Hacker News Reader

Does simplicity in their design really detract from the feat of their accomplishments? There’s a tendency to gravitate towards expensive big budget missions. Is success measured by the biggest budget or the complexity of the problem? The deserving accomplishments here are the length of time and distance traveled while still returning useful scientific data that has never been done before and may not be done again for some time.

View on HN

> Is success measured by the biggest budget or the complexity of the problem?

Certainly not by the budget, spending money isn't hard -- but by success in the face of complexity, yes, absolutely.

How is success tied to a budget or complexity? Success doesn't care how hard/easy it was. It just means it was able to do the thing it was made for. If the task was to be able to write in space, a pencil would be just as successful as a newly developed pen that writes in 0g.

Until graphite dust shorts the emergency hatch release switch. I do agree though that making a sensor and datalink that lasts half a century outside the magnetosphere and can even get updates over that time is extremely impressive and might not be replicable with today's mindset.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com