Engineers, such as those on the Phoenix Mars Lander crew, look at past mistakes to learn and to improve future work.
Last week, the Phoenix Mars Lander descended successfully to the surface of Mars, the first probe to land on it's legs since the Viking missions. NASA's mission crew had every right to be nervous, since 55% of recent missions to Mars ended in failure. Mission Control breathed a deep sigh of relief when the lander beamed back pictures of it's surroundings near Mars' north pole.
Phoenix certainly lives up to it's name. The guts of the probe were originally from the Mars Surveyor probe that was supposed to follow the Mars Polar Lander to the red planet. When the Polar Lander crashed in 1999, the Mars Surveyor program was shelved. The systems engineers pulled out the old probe to rework it into the Phoenix Mars Lander. Their goal was to learn from the mistakes of the previous Mars missions, and fortunately, or unfortunately, they had a lot of data to guide them. It seem that NASA engineers have learned from their mistakes and unforseen circumstances of previous launches, for the Phoenix Lander has been so far a success.
While most industries don't operate on the multi-year (or multi-decade) time scale that NASA does, we can learn from our experiences and apply what we know to create better products and services. George Santayana penned the famous quote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." While this quote is in reference to history, it also applies to engineering.
