How do we win proposals? With good ideas? Rarely. Because new ideas shine brightly but also cast a dark shadow: the element of unacceptable risk. What is it, then, that auditors and evaluators can never know?

The unknowable is so simple. It's the answer to one question: how many engineering hours does it take to build a radio? Maybe it's 2200, or maybe it's 2000, or 1300. Who can say? We can't; we can only place very vague limits on it.

This question has infinite manifestations. There's radios, but there's also power supplies, computers, I/O boards and memories, none of which can be pinned down in advance. How many people, and how many months, will it take to debug an integrated spacecraft?

How many months will the launch be delayed? How many problems requiring significant engineering resources will occur during the first 90 days of a mission? So we end up, consciously or unconsciously, erring on the side of minimum proposed cost.

We euphemistically refer to this as a "success-oriented" program plan. We know that if we don't do it, the competition surely will -- and if their cost is lower but credible, they'll get the job. And what's the downside? We'll have to increase our real cost later and take a paper beating in the press, but so what?

But "Better-Faster-Cheaper" doesn't allow the overrun outcome which salvaged so many classical aerospace programs. Rather, programs that overrun more than 5% are now cancelled. But they are still underbid; and even if some are bid realistically, the selection process weeds out those reality-handicapped bids, because by definition the minimum credible bid wins. But now the underbid spacecraft are shipped and flown unprepared. After all, better to fly and take the chance -- since probably it will work -- than admit the truth and get the program cancelled.

Did underbidding weaken our Mars program? Of course it did -- but probably not fatally. Did overpromising kill these missions? Of course not -- but it forced us to accept higher risk without preparing the public for the fact that mission success was not only not assured, but possibly not even likely. Every mission rolls the dice. In more adequately funded missions, the money is spread over virtually all the possible outcomes; whereas on ultra-lean missions, a lot more failure modes are unexplored.

But large missions in a world of scarce resources means less missions. So even if failure is less likely, it is more devastating. Mars missions could be slowed down. We could do better polar mapping before we drop a spacecraft onto the surface. We could launch much larger rockets, allowing a much slower descent onto Mars so that we could maintain telemetry all the way down. We could have a constellation of communication spacecraft, and maybe GPS capability, in orbit around Mars. We could build two of everything, and do the mission again after we learn a thing or two from the first one.

Less than 15 years ago, every major mission afforded dual spacecraft and launches. Now none do. But for the cost of one of those major missions from a bygone era, we can do 10 Mars missions like the two which have just failed. And they would be a diverse set of 10 missions -- some might go to the poles, some to the equator or other regions. Some might carry certain types of probes, and others completely different payloads.

Like Earth's species, diversification lowers risk. One may die off, but others may thrive in unexpected circumstances. We owe our existence on the planet to that diversity. It's time for the aerospace community not to return to high school -- or to strict, outdated ways of doing things which drive up cost and kill diversity. But it's also time to rein in our belief that now that we have choices, everything is possible. Management of expectations is not in our nature. But it should be.

The most experienced microsat-building organization in the world is Amsat -- a loose association of people who build satellites for fun over weekends and evenings. Amsat has a flight success record of better than 95%, although most Amsat members may never have read a NASA or Mil Spec. How do they pull that off? Should NASA do a million-dollar study of Amsat technology and program management? Maybe create a whole new set of satellite-building rules based on what a bunch of ham radio operators do? Definitely not!

Amsat succeeds simply because it doesn't play to an audience demanding more and more for less and less. Its engineers have historically done that which they themselves felt comfortable doing, given the time, energy and expertise available to them. Amsat does simple missions, and they work.

It is an abuse of microspace technology to graft the techniques which work so well for small low-cost satellites into ever more complex, expensive, critical and heavily managed programs -- just as we have abused our choices when we choose to stay up all night before a final exam, and then fall asleep in the middle of it. The fault is not in the availability of choice, but in the choosing. Our best choice today is to create missions that are definitely doable within the budgets we allocate to them -- and, when those budgets are small, to use the methods already being practiced at AeroAstro and other builders of small, low-cost spacecraft. It is in mission definition and budgeting that we create the environment in which success and failure are going to play out.

We may occasionally cheat the odds and do a highly complex mission successfully with inadequate resources, but this only creates the wrong response when the predictable failures occur. The path to the highest success rate is embracing microsatellite techniques, and flying large numbers of diverse small missions, each one well suited to the nature and capability of small, low-cost spacecraft.

Neither retrenchment to conventional techniques, nor stretching to do more with less, is going to pay off other than occasionally; its result, at best, will be that of creating a gambler's mentality and the destructive habit of going for the long bomb too often. Now that we have a choice of engineering strategies, we must choose to use it wisely, and thus to create a new renaissance in space.

The fault, as Shakespeare said, is not in our stars -- not in the laws of probability nor in the nature of the missions themselves -- but in ourselves, our expectations and our choices.

Rick Fleeter, is President of AeroAstro Inc a Micro Satellite maker located in Herndon, Virginia.

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