Cute reply, but woefully lacking in meaningful information. I'm guessing that as the lander inherited a most of it's hardware from prior projects, project engineers were obligated to use landing rockets because they had no choice. If I remember correctly, this mission cost about half of the previous successful lander budget. What's undignified is the project director stating "beggars can't be choosers". Can't wait to see photos! On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Ann House <ann@annhouse.org> wrote:
I was listening to NPR on Friday. One of the project seniors was speaking and was asked, "why jets and not airbags?" The project director stated, "I don't feel it is very dignified to arrive as a guest on another planet bouncing around in a bag."