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Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

Eh, at this point it's a boy crying wolf situation. Whenever there's a new space gizmo you know they're going to say "we only designed it to work for eight minutes", and then six months later it'll still be chugging along, because the actual design life was measured in years.

They could at least say "the doodad is designed to work for two years, but there's a 5% chance that it'll be DOA, because so many things can go wrong in space". That would be more realistic.

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you don't deserve to be downvoted (this place is ridiculous) because saying that there's a "boy crying wolf" aspect is true, and it was the whole point of learning that story which point apparently some people missed.

but there is also a position I'd like to point out between the one most people here are taking ("NASA over-engineers every part individually to avoid failures")

and yours ("here's our reasonably expected life, but could come up short")

and that is: they need to set a bar that evaluates a reasonable amount of science they need to accomplish to justify the budget.

It's not the minimum number ("crashed in flames but we learned some things")

and it's not the gloriously optimistic number ("this thing's still going after 12 years, it's really worth it!")

and it's not a fake marketing expectations number ("we'll fake the budget numbers so we can razzle dazzle by blowing past the expectations")

rather it's just, "for X hundred million we expect to spend a month taking pics in every direction and gathering and analyzing some rocks from different promising places, and that mission alone is worth it" because that's what congress is approving

The problem is people hear what they want to hear. Much like telling a PM that a project is probably going to take 2 weeks but might extend to 2 months. Guess which number they are going to remember and hold you to?

Not really. They are putting experimental hardware into an environment that is not well understood. It is also being done by very public facing organizations with very large budgets. They basically have to guarantee that they will deliver what they say they will deliver. From a public relations standpoint, it may even be easier to justify a complete failure than an 80% success since a string of 80% successes will look like incompetence while a few complete failures are quickly forgotten.

It is always an exercise in horrible estimates and it gets really tiresome. If you always greatly exceed the estimate (by orders of magnitude!) it wasn’t a good estimate, it was PR. I assume NASA has real estimates they use internally. No one could be this bad at it and still have a job there surely.

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