re: Disturbing news on Mars Science Laboratory
Some projects are well conceived and well run. I suspect that MSL may be neither. The large, powered landing vehicle is quite complex w/o last minute tacking on solar panels, etc. A 2 year delay was ample time to rethink the basics and increase the likelihood of success. MSL has not done so. Fortunately, we've had many well conceived, successfully managed unmanned space missions. When Kepler was delayed because of funding, program managers deleted the complex and expensive movable high gain antenna albeit at the cost of 1 day per month of data.