Conversation

One reason I like space probes is that they’re all nearly unique. Even similar probes on different missions quickly acquire a unique mission history. There’s no “excellence” because there’s nothing to compare to.
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Things either work or don’t, and the probe either survives with enough juice to try another trick that’s worth a bit of NASA budget or it doesn’t. There’s almost a life-like quality to how missions that survive one objective can be retargeted to another.