Spaceflight Now: Curiosity rover assembled as cost impacts debated

"The MSL cost growth is also slowing the development of all other NASA planetary programs and will delay by 2-4 years all other Mars programs coming after MSL, including a Mars sample return now envisioned for the 2020s."

"MSL is burdened with a $1.68 billion (68%) development overrun and prospects for the need of an additional $115 million to finish the program."

"According to a mid July NASA Advisory Council Report the "Rover Power System design does not meet present mission requirements, requiring the rover to need additional battery capacity and possibly addition of a solar array in addition to its nuclear power system."

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The original manager has been demoted, but obviously in this case this was too little, too late. This has been a failure of all upper management and oversight, all the way up to the president and congress. We've got the benefit of hindsight, but obviously this was too ambitous in conception for a reasonable budget.

As an engineer, I think it is fairly obvious they tried to put to many new innovations into one project. After all, they have invented a totally new landing system. The rover itself has been scaled up so significantly that it could be anticipated that many new challenges would present themselves. They made an early design decision to go with RTG (nuclear decay) power. Evidently they did this without having a handle on what the power requirments would even be. Or even worse, they had a hard power budget, and could not design to that budget.

This is a very frightening project, because of how many eggs have been placed in this (single) basket. A failure of this project will have cost the mars exploration program 6 years (and a whole lot of money).

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On the positive side, I'm hoping that this "sky crane" landing system is proven and can be reused a number of times (including ESA exomars). Also, if this rover can be successfully landed, I'm hoping its mission life will once again far exceed expectation so we can get a lot of science out of it.

Some lessons for NASA:

1) When a project is clearly out of control at an early stage, either cancel the project or replace management then not later.
2) Use a little common sense to limit the number of innovations for any given single project. (I'm still finding it hard to understand how many design flaws, and inconsistencies can be present at such a late date).
3) Critical path delays (mars 2 year launch opportunity slippages) are unacceptable. The projects must be ensured to complete on time for the launch opportunity. Use overlapping development if necessary to meet this requirement.
4) Try to standardize the current rover platform, so that a number of these rovers can be built with much lower costs.

I know NASA already tries to reuse technology, and create standards to share among their craft. This seems to be a case where a series(3+) of rovers that largely share technology should've been designed to be sent one after the other on the 2 year launch cycle. The first rover should've been forced to meet its schedule no matter what with the landing system the priority. The next rovers could embellish on instruments and other capabilities.

In NASA defense, the ground conditions on Mars as an engineering issue have been largely speculative until recent rover explorations.
Again in hindsight, it appears they just went for too big of a rover in one step up from the previous ones. Hopefully, the increased range and speed of the rover will result in increased opportunity for science and will compensate somewhat for the delays.

Finally, I think it may be time to rethink "sample return." I starting to be convinced that innovations may start to occur that will make it possible to do analysis of samples at Mars at a good enough depth to make it not worth the cost to return the samples for earth side testing. Maybe, what NASA needs to keep watch on are microlaboraties, and spectroscopic advances. I know we have some amazing machines on earth that can do some analysis that can't be done on a small rover. The question is can we do enough their to find out what we really need to know.