From: "Phil Payne" 

> Might want to hire the engineers for any future manned flights tho.

I doubt they'd be interested.

They'd recognise that any device requiring very tight temperature and
atmospheric controls, plus a regular supply of nutrients whether it was
actually working or not, is inherently unsuited to this kind of mission.
The Voyagers set the standard, the rovers have eclipsed it.  Whatever comes
next will benefit from the truly massive advances since then.  One gigabyte
of permanent flash memory now costs less than a good lunch.

IMO the USA has a number of things it can truly be proud of.  One is a
series of spacecraft designs that allowed aged technology to be exploited
well beyond what you would normally expect to be possible.  Another is
sheer build quality.  The third is an on-the-ground can-do approach to
solving problems billions of miles away.

And just about every week someone comes up with a whacky way of squeezing a
new idea out of data intended for some utterly different purpose.

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