But really, would it have been considered sane either from an engineering perspective or programmaticially to produce 15,000 unique sonobouys rather than perfecting a single design or handful of at least semi-standardized designs and then replicating them? The RAN thought the latter, it wold appear. At what point is NASA going to do more of this sort of thing itself?
Depends entirely upon what aspect you are talking about.
But from a system design point of view, there is a ton of stuff that is proven. The processor systems, the rockets, the heat shield, the radar, the power system etc etc. So really, the only thing you can argue is a budget thing - whether you do one big $2BN project, or 10 smaller $200M robots. The added complexing in Curiosity is due to the sheer massive scale of the rover and it's equipment.
Big budget high profile high risk projects actually have a decent track record. e.g. both Voyager probes worked, both Viking landers worked, the Pioneer probes, Mariner (7 of 10), Casini, Magellen, and the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
6 out of 7 attempts to land on Mars by NASA have been successful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Probing_difficultiesThere is a big difference between very carefully engineering and testing one unit, and doing the same for a run of 15,000 where you don't care if a few fail, and indeed it's expected.
But as always, if it fails, heads will roll and people will cry it's a waste of money. But if it's work, NASA are heroes and it's money well spent.
And that sucks, because it shouldn't be about the money. NASA gets chump change.
Dave.
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