If they had been built with a much lower life expectancy, we could have used the resulting savings to build more capable (albeit, less durable) machines, or, alternatively, built a lot more of them.

Now, it could be argued that designing the rover too well was pointless, since the delivery system had a much higher probability of failure than the rover itself. We would have had a guaranteed better outcome scenario if we had spent more money and effort upgrading the rest of the mission than the rover itself. Our successful rover was mostly just good luck. Then again, it might also be argued that it would have been unfortunate that a poor rover would have ruined the entire mission, even if the rest of the delivery systems had functioned perfectly. So where do you draw the line? That is, after all, also an engineering decision. It isn’t easy in a chaotic, fractal universe.

Resources are always limited. How do you determine what proportion of your resources and assets are devoted to each component of a complex system in order to optimize overall results over time? I guess this is the “art” part of engineering, as supposed to the “science” part. I suspect unquantifiable human attributes like intuition, experience, judgement and guesswork and just plain luck play a big role in this. And we do this collectively, in teams, so management and organization plays a role in this too. We are monkeys, for better or worse, we do things together. With all the conflict and friction that implies, sometimes the results are magnificent. No single man could have sent our eyes, ears, and voices to another world.

Sorry for the stream of consciousness. I started out to write a different essay altogether, and it wound up here. But I like it, and I’ll let it stand.