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Does NASA just set very limited goals for public performance/political reasons? As most missions seem to amazingly blow past these initial expectations.

I get that NASA has some brilliant people, but I struggle to believe that the initial mission times that NASA gives are genuine estimates of what is achievable. Everything always exceeds expectations. Maybe that is just the prevailing culture as we expect everything to exceed expectations.

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Quite the contrary, I believe NASA is very serious about meeting their goals. If the goal was to fly for 30 days, then they'd have a huge challenge in over-engineering the mission to ensure 30 days. This way, they can get the initial proof done (hooray!) and then run the robot to failure (which itself will be interesting.) It might fail in 30 days. It might not.

Another benefit of this approach is, as with Spirit & Odyssey, they can use off-the-shelf components if they meet the initial goal.

Inversely, I blame congress and general population to be more critical on a mission failure (non-life threatening) than they need to. Rocket science and operating toys on another planet isn't easy.

The way it is now, it's a feedback loop that's working for everyone.

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