text: by kfg ( 145172 ) writes: on Sunday May 28, 2006 @12:01PM (#15420642)
  Price is not function. A $20 million Formula One car, for instance, has a functional halflife of about 4 hours, because it is designed that way, much of that $20 million being spent to effectively shorten it's halflife compared to a street car. In fact the perfect racing car has been defined as one that falls apart one foot after crossing the finish line, since anything else implies it has been overengineered at the sacrifice of its intended performance.
  If such a car went a full season competively without an engine rebuild every mechanical engineer in the world would wish to study it. It would be a true marvel.
  by Darth_brooks ( 180756 ) writes: <clipper377@noSpaM.gmail.com> on Sunday May 28, 2006 @12:26PM (#15420755) Homepage
  by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) writes: <fairwaterNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday May 28, 2006 @11:26PM (#15422962) Homepage
  But NASA has decided instead to throw away all of that and spend money to develop a new, bigger probe, the Mars Science Labratory.
  The current Rover's can only reach about 2% of the Martian surface, and are extremely lucky to last more than a few months - so we should stick with them? That's insane.
  Here in the real world, the Mars Science Laboratory builds on the experience gained from the two MER rovers, in the same way that the MER rovers built on Pathfinder, which built on decades of research and development. Nothing is 'thrown away'.
  It's a shame that the limited science money NASA gets isn't being spent in the most efficient way possible on stuff that we know to will give excellent scientific data, but instead is used for these kinds of big budget employment makers.
  Sure, they've given us excellent data - but there's more questions and more data needed. Questions the MER rovers can't answer and data they can't provide.