The James Webb Space Telescope was in the news a couple of months ago after the primary mirror sustained a bit of damage from a micro meteoroid hit. Not a big deal. The damage is small compared to the size of the mirror and the frequency of these hits can be probabilistically forecasted to ensure performance requirements are met over the lifetime of the mission. What caught my eye was that the telescope is still performing twice as good as the requirements dictated.

Back up a little bit, twice as good.

That is an insane amount and I can guarantee it didn’t come for free. In aerospace we often have a problem with over-conservatism. Margin gets stacked on margin and systems get way over-built. It makes me wonder, how much time and money is needlessly spent on programs and is there any way to address that? In our culture we need to get better at determining when good enough is good enough.