reminds me of Surveyor
When you said An obvious strategy is to crank out MERs like Volkswagen bugs, it reminded me of the old days when I worked at Hughes. I used to take a lunchtime walk over to the manufacturing building and watch them put together the Surveyor Moon Landers. They had 7 in there being worked on at the same time like an assembly line. Of the 7, 5 succeeded and 2 failed.