Re: Redundancy has a cost
"NASA (and ESA/JAXA/etc) are the only ones who understand the true utility of redundancy and who are ready to support the cost of it, because when your probe is a billion miles away, you'd better hope that you have a functional backup plan if something goes wrong."
This seems a bit unfair: redundancy is prevalent in human safety-critical areas, though arguably too often only due to lessons written in blood. The on-board systems of aircraft are an obvious, fairly topical example but even everyday things like "mirror, signal, manoeuvre" incorporate redundancy.