[brownsfan]

Its not a matter of dry run of the hardware or software, its the fact that despite the best efforts of thousands of individuals, all for the most part highly intelligent, unforseen situations arrise.....

I respectfully disagree. I don't think the proper effort was given to "dry runs". I think that testing was pushed aside, 9 days isn't enough. On a larger scale, I'm concerned that NASA no longer has the dedication and drive to work "miracles" as it once did. Here's hoping they get both rovers repaired. I support NASA's mission, I'm just not sure about the current NASA administration.

[DeepDish]

That is the problem is it not. It almost takes a miracle to pull off a successful mission. A flawless mission would be like the second coming of Christ with no casualties. No way, and no how.

One thing JPL said, before the problems cropped up, was these landers were put together fast, not cheap, but fast because of the launch window. An extra year for design analysis would have been nice.

[HamiltonJay]

Miracles?

They just shot 2 slugs into space, landed them on a foreign planet that 1/2 the attempts to reach have failed, had them land on the planet almost exactly where we wanted them to.... And despite travelling for 8 months in space and how many millions of miles they landed, and for the most part are operating properly....

I don't know what counts as miracles in your book, but do the statistical odds that we would get one of these things to even get to mars and answer, much less both and both still work?

[John H K]

There actually never was any "NASA Glory Era" where everything worked perfectly.

We had launch vehicles blowing up left and right in the early 60s. The Apollo I ground test killed 3 people. We almost lost Apollo 13.

And we've consistently done better than everyone else. The Soviets had an obscene number of Venus and Mars probes fail. The Japanese just had theirs fail. Beagle 2 failed.

Not that better performance shouldn't be demanded and expected but there's a limit to how perfectly reliable all of this is going to be.