Spirit rover glitch explained.

[KennyR]

"My daddy always used to say that if you wanted to put in a nail, you didn't do anythin' fancy, you just took a hammer and hit that son-of-a-bitch until it goes in there." - Soldier.

Which is my way of saying that I still think the NASA rovers were over-engineered.

[KennyR]

@Tigger

Making something self-repairing is not the same as making something so simple it wouldn't (and can't) have had errors in the first place. Russian engineering was always clunky and simplistic, but always very sturdy and practical at the same time, from T-34s to rockets. In some cases adding self-repair is even a detriment, not an advantage.

I'm very skeptical at the introduction of high level operating systems to probes at all - these are basically for the human interface. Remove the high level stuff and you can make the chips simpler and sturdier - not to mention cheaper.

[KennyR]

The Russians never put a man on the moon either. Actually its very surprising what they did manage to do, given that most of their GNP went on their military and nuclear arsenals.