>>11172152>Years between Martian roversBuilding something as big and complicated as a Curiosity-Class rover takes time, who would’ve guessed it? Couple that with the Mars transfer window only opening every two years.
>"it has to work perfectly or we're doomed" mentality of missions
Lots of NASA probes have redundancy built into them and many experience small failures during their careers, just look at what happened to Kepler.
>No Neptune nor Uranus probes since VoyagerNASA doesn’t actually decide where their probes go, the decadal survey does. It sets out NASA’s planetary exploration goals for the decade and NASA builds probes to fulfil them.
>JWST taking foreverJWST was a poorly conceived mission built around technology that didn’t even exist at the time of conception, of course it has faced massive delays. The spacecraft is complete now, but has to go through numerous tests because of it’s ‘all or nothing design’. Also, if you think JWST is bad, I’ll be happy to enlighten you that Hubble’s development started in the 1970s and it was launched in 1990...
>Heaviest probe was a mere 2 tonsCassini launch mass: 5,712 kg
>Should something like Mars Surveyor (fast and cheap probes) be resurrected?No, NASA tried that again in the 90s and it failed horribly. The current batch of ‘slow and expensive’ probes have a stellar reliability record.
>>11172172When your one of a kind spacecraft costs several billion to build, you tend to care more about the reliability and performance of the launcher, than saving a relatively tiny sum by picking a cheaper ride. ULA consistently bags the multi-billion dollar flagship missions because of vertical integration, Centaur’s performance and their near stainless reliability record. SpaceX has started winning the launch contracts for smaller, cheaper exploration-class payloads because NASA can save a decent fraction of the overall mission cost by picking a cheaper launch service provider.
