Rooting for David over Goliath may make for good storytelling, but it is not necessarily good science policy. Unfortunately, there has been a long history of contrasting the value of smaller grant programs with NASA’s flagship science missions. While the smaller missions may appear to be more cost-effective, scientific metrics show us that the flagship missions actually have been the major contributors to science return — accounting for more than 42 percent of all NASA’s discoveries in the last three decades.
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