"This is the most complex Rube Goldberg series of deployments ever attempted in space..."

Following the spectacular failure of Mars Climate Orbiter (due to a mix-up of metric vs. English units), NASA embarked on an era of “faster, better, cheaper”.?Rather than putting all its eggs (and dollars) in a once-a-decade proverbial basket, NASA adopted a distributed and incremental risk posture.?Successes that followed, like Martian rovers Sojourner and Curiosity,? seemed to validate this approach.?Now, with JWST, NASA has returned to a single high risk, high benefit mission. If successful, the capability of JWST will be fantastic.?If it fails, the impact will doubtless be felt for years to come.?Regardless, as engineers (and taxpaying customers), we should always consider the risk/benefit trade-off. Could this mission have been accomplished in another way with lower risk? What would it have taken to significantly lower the risk posture? And finally, under what conditions should we ever put this many eggs in one basket again?

link to deployment video with headline quote: hyperlink