You may have heard that the “Ingenuity” helicopter, which has been flying on Mars for the last three years, came a cropper and broke one of its rotor blades a couple of weeks ago. Not bad for a project that was really put together as an afterthought, a proof of concept that was planned to maybe last 30 days and make five flights at most. Here <https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/now-that-weve-flown-on-mars-what-comes-next-in-aerial-planetary-exploration/> is a description of some more details of how it was put together, within stringent limits on both mass and money. Apparently, a radiation-hardened RAD750 computer, which is normally used for such space missions, costs a quarter of a million USD. And would have weighed too much anyway. So they used a cheap, lightweight Qualcomm chip instead, state of the art for smartphones of just a few years ago. And massively more powerful. And of course they ran off-the-shelf open-source software on it <https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/meet-the-open-source-software-powering-nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter>, <https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/19/22291324/linux-perseverance-mars-curiosity-ingenuity>, <https://spectrum.ieee.org/nasa-designed-perseverance-helicopter-rover-fly-autonomously-mars>. Flying a chopper on Mars isn’t easy: the rotor tips on Ingenuity were moving at Mach 0.65 (on Mars, Mach 1.0, the speed of sound, is about 240m/s). A future chopper is planned to push this to Mach 0.95. You might say they were cutting corners on this design, which made it inherently more risky. But if the lower costs and simpler development can lead to shorter lead times, and hence more missions, maybe a higher failure rate would be worth it.