Comment by gus_massa
6 days ago
> without enough slack to be able to absorb problems if some earlier dependent outcome is unfavorable
It's strange because unmanned mission are heavy in the "under promise and over deliver" territory. They may say something like "we are sending a car to Mars for a month", but everything is over engineered to last for a year. Then it miraculously work for eleven month and it's a huge success.
I guess the conclusion is that the manned missions since the Moon landing were for Cold War reasons. (With that kind of mentality.) And when that ended they made even less sense.
For example when they had to go up to refill the wiper fluid on the Hubble in '93 it was no biggie, because as shitty as the shuttle was, it was at least reuse-minded, and there were regular missions (and budget for that). The ISS assembly coasted on the Clinton era budget surplus, but then it was evident that prancing in LEO is great for hijacking Soviet satellites, but not much else.
And compared to the Hubble the JWST was a classic Eminem mission (one shot, one opportunity ... no, wait! that's on Mars!), even if it took 5-10 more years than planned, it seems it was completely worth it.
Are you just now learning about propaganda?
No, it's just strange that different parts of the same organization make oposite decisions for the propaganda.
Culturally they're not really the same organization. JPL has a different culture than Goddard, which is different than Marshall, etc.