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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how long they expected it to remain in working condition. NASA has a habit of underestimating lifespans by a comical amount. It will be like "we expected the rover to operate for 10 weeks and that was 6 years ago". I think the most extreme example is Voyager 1, which was on a 5-year mission that reached nearly 50 years.

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They planned for three 90 second flights prior to launch. After those worked they transitioned over to longer "operations demo" flights and those were extended tentatively out to 12 flights. After the 21st flight they just stopped manually allocating labor and funding to the project for a set number of flights and instead gave them a running budget for indefinite continued operations.

So while "strictly speaking" they planned for three 90 second flights. There was the unstated assumption that it'd be used for much more than that as long as it actually worked effectively.

It sounds as though mission life has as much to do with funding for ground staff (not something I ever considered) at least as much as it has to do with the life expectancy of deployed hardware.

Yep. For example, Spirit and Opportunity were part of the Mars Exploration Rovers mission. 2/3 of that mission's total cost was the development, manufacture, and launch of the rovers themselves. Which more or less "per unit" works to 1/3 of the total mission cost per rover. The other third of that mission cost was staffing for the (15 year) ongoing mission from when it passed the initial mission parameters to when opportunity finally was deemed dead in 2018.

https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-the-mars-expl...

“We need the rover to operate for 10 weeks and will be discredited as an organization if it fails at 9” is what causes that. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

I always feel like NASA has mastered the basic "under promise, over deliver" philosophy that keeps the lights on and the next missions funded. I'd love to be a fly on the wall at who they get to tap dance in front of the congressional committee or how they schmooze the decadal people to rise above the rest.

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