I'm being somewhat tongue-and-cheek, I'm not actually that critical of NASA. But there's the Hubble's optical problems, the stuck antenna the Galileo, problems with the mars rover, etc. You're completely right, when you send something way up into space for three years, there's a reasonable chance of things not going as expected, infact, that's exactly my point; it's just a scary concept how high the margin for error is. And as I said in my previous post, these guys are some of the smartest in the world--they've probably done better, overall, than other programs such as the russian cosmonaut programs. And of course, they do all their risk analysis studies, and in a case like this, I'm sure they calculated the possibility that the parachutes wouldn't open, and they eventually decided that it wasn't a large enough risk to have a contingency plan.
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