Dr David Whitehouse considers the pitfalls of a low-cost approach to space exploration We've been here before.
Failure is nothing new in spaceflight and there is nothing that can be done about it.
It was clear that, at a time when budgets were tight and getting tighter, it was a bad idea to put all your eggs in one basket when exploring the planets. The newly installed head of Nasa, Dan Goldin, took this as his mantra. Lose a billion dollar spacecraft and a whole generation of scientists are affected. MPL was put up on a Delta 2 rocket Just weeks ago, MPL's sister ship, the Mars Climate Orbiter, was lost because of a stupid mistake, the failure to properly convert English and metric measurement units. The cost of one person's salary could have been enough to spot that mistake.