claim: Mars surface-mission targeting precision improved by more than two orders of magnitude across the robotic era: Viking-era ellipses on the order of hundreds of kilometers in major dimension, the Mars Science Laboratory cut the targeting region to roughly twenty kilometers via guided lifting entry and a range-triggered parachute deploy, and the documented EDL system performance is the empirical record the contraction is read from.

source: Steltzner et al., Mars Science Laboratory: Entry, Descent, and Landing System Performance, IEEE Aerospace Conference (2007)

grade: A

source: Way et al., Mars Science Laboratory: Entry, Descent, and Landing System Overview, IEEE Aerospace Conference (2008)

facet: empirics

subclaim: real


claim: Guided lifting entry and the entry-guidance algorithm that nulls hypersonic downrange and crossrange dispersion are characterized in the engineering record for MSL precision landing, establishing the first technology lever the dissertation codes as a discrete addition to the prescriptive landing-technique base.

source: Mendeck et al., Entry Guidance Performance for Mars Precision Landing, Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics 31(4) (2008)

source: Mendeck & Craig, Entry Guidance for the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory Mission, AIAA (2011)

facet: mechanism


claim: The range-to-go parachute trigger and its footprint reduction are documented for MSL as a distinct error-source corrector (the parachute-deploy dispersion), supplying the second discrete technology lever in the covariate set.

source: Way, On the use of a range trigger for the Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing, IEEE Aerospace Conference (2011)


claim: Terrain-relative navigation via the Mars 2020 Lander Vision System collapsed the position-knowledge error and enabled an autonomous divert, delivering Perseverance inside hazardous Jezero terrain that earlier systems could not have attempted, the third technology lever and the mission that anchors the largest attributed contraction.

source: Johnson et al., Mars 2020 Lander Vision System Flight Performance, AIAA SciTech (2022)

source: Cheng et al., Making an Onboard Reference Map From MRO/CTX Imagery for Mars 2020 Lander Vision System, Earth and Space Science 8(4) (2021)


claim: The cross-mission landing-ellipse contraction is documented qualitatively one mission at a time, with no joint time-series model and no formal attribution of the contraction to specific technologies against rival causes; each engineering paper reports its own mission's design ellipse and reconstructed performance but none was designed to arbitrate causes across missions, which is the gap the dissertation addresses.

source: Karlgaard et al., Statistical Reconstruction of Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Trajectories and Atmospheric Profiles, AIAA (2007)

source: Karlgaard, Kutty, Schoenenberger & Shidner, Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent, and Landing Trajectory and Atmosphere Reconstruction, NASA NTRS 20130010087 (2013)

grade: B

subclaim: material


claim: Future Mars architectures (Mars Sample Return retrieval and the eventual human landing) must each specify a landing-accuracy requirement years in advance, and landing accuracy is set jointly with retrieval mass, sample-tube reachability, and surface mobility, so a defensible attributed contraction rate is a material input to a requirement-setting trade the agency currently runs by qualitative negotiation.

source: Mars Sample Return Campaign Concept Status, Acta Astronautica (2020)

source: Final Report of the Mars Sample Return Science Planning Group 2 (MSPG2), Astrobiology (2021)

facet: governance


claim: Mokyr's criterion holds that technological progress depends on a widening propositional base and that a prescriptive technique resting on a deeper propositional base is the durable macro-invention; the macro-versus-incremental ranking of EDL levers can therefore be anchored to theory-maturity dates that precede and are independent of the ellipse series rather than read off the regressand.

source: Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, Princeton University Press (2002)

facet: identification

subclaim: mechanism


claim: Guided entry inherits Apollo-heritage entry-guidance theory codified decades before MSL and re-flown as MSL Entry Guidance, evidencing a wide and mature propositional base; TRN's map-matching base matured visibly later, first validated in a relevant-environment real-time flight test in 2015, supplying theory-maturity dates that order guided entry versus TRN independent of the ellipse outcome.

source: Mars Science Laboratory Entry Guidance, NASA NTRS 20110003649 (2011)

grade: C

source: Real-time Terrain Relative Navigation Test Results from a Relevant Environment for Mars Landing, NASA NTRS 20160009627 (2015)


claim: The Mokyrian extensibility test for a durable macro-invention is compounding, transferable self-correction on a widening base, not the magnitude of a one-time level shift; the discriminating measurement is the slope of the predict-versus-flight residual across reuse instances. TRN supplies a documented reuse-with-evaluation trajectory (2015 relevant-environment test to Mars 2020 flight-versus-predicts assessment) that exhibits the extensible signature, but the dissertation estimator fits only the per-insertion level shift and so cannot detect the property as specified.

source: Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena, Princeton University Press (2002)

source: Assessment of M2020 Terrain Relative Landing Accuracy: Flight Performance vs Predicts, NASA NTRS 20230007014 (2021)

facet: measurement


claim: Useful-knowledge spillovers are empirically localized geographically and institutionally (patent citations are significantly more likely to originate in the same state/metropolitan area as the cited patent), so a knowledge-access-cost effect concentrated in specific JPL/Langley reconstruction-and-modeling teams is a genuine rival cause the InSight counterfactual does not break, because InSight was reconstructed by the same apparatus; the test that would separate it is whether accuracy improvements track method-codification dates rather than lever-flight dates.

source: Jaffe, Trajtenberg & Henderson, Geographic Localization of Knowledge Spillovers as Evidenced by Patent Citations, Quarterly Journal of Economics 108(3) (1993)

facet: rival

subclaim: alternatives


claim: Kuznets's national-accounts measurement discipline requires that any reported series figure carry an explicit definition of coverage, a stated valuation/normalization convention, and a netting rule such that two reasonable analysts re-derive the same number; the named modern per-mission primary records are individually re-derivable, but no source defines a cross-era deflator equalizing the probability content of a Viking-era three-sigma against a modern Monte Carlo three-sigma, so the dependent variable's inter-era commensurability is unestablished.

source: Landefeld, Seskin & Fraumeni, Taking the Pulse of the Economy: Measuring GDP, Journal of Economic Perspectives 22(2) (2008)

source: Spencer et al., Mars Pathfinder Entry, Descent, and Landing Reconstruction


claim: An achieved-miss-distance cross-check is a legitimately independent construct because it shares none of the predicted-ellipse dispersion-percentile conventions; such a flight-performance-versus-predicts series is published for Mars 2020 and corroborated by an independent flight-instrumentation record, but retrieval establishes the cross-check only for the most recent mission, so as evidenced it can catch gross divergence at the modern endpoint but not the partial, technology-collinear convention drift across the full Viking-to-Mars-2020 span.

source: Chen, Casoliva, Montgomery & Serricchio, Assessment of M2020 Terrain Relative Landing Accuracy: Flight Performance vs Predicts, NASA NTRS 20230007014 (2021)

source: Zheng, Shamah, Schaffner & Ravine, Mars 2020 Lander Vision System Flight Performance, NASA NTRS 20230006986 (2022)


claim: A single ~45-year epoch of ~11 bespoke vehicles, with the contraction clustered at named discrete technology insertions (Pathfinder airbag heritage, MSL guided entry, Mars 2020 TRN), is the configuration where a 3-4-knot step function and a smooth log-linear learning curve are observationally near-equivalent; on this sample the constant-proportional-rate interpretation is not identified against the level-shift alternative without a reported model-comparison fit statistic favoring log-linearity.

source: Kuznets (with Jenks), Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings, NBER


claim: An aggregate contraction rate decomposes into level-conditional within- and between-components whose sign and magnitude depend on the regime already reached, so if the eleven points cannot statistically separate a steep S-curve regime from floor-approach, the learning rate is a regime-local, level-conditional quantity conditioned on the level already attained rather than a structural constant licensed to price the next vehicle.

source: McMillan & Rodrik, Globalization, Structural Change and Productivity Growth, NBER WP No. 17143 (2011)


claim: The behavioral-methods objection to a tiny hand-ordered series is grounded: WYSIATI (an analyst builds a coherent learning-curve story backward from a known monotone outcome and is overconfident in it), the law of small numbers / availability (one salient case overweighted, base rate ignored), and researcher degrees of freedom warrant the blind-coding, base-rate-residual, and multiverse-grid demands; reference-class forecasting is the documented corrective.

source: Tversky & Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science 185(4157):1124 (1974)

source: Flyvbjerg, Curbing Optimism Bias and Strategic Misrepresentation in Planning: Reference Class Forecasting in Practice, European Planning Studies (2007)


claim: Mission-oriented innovation policy treats the directional, capability-building public program (Apollo as archetype) as the engine that builds durable capability and spillovers, not a residual time trend, so a binary on a technology's first-flight and a generic Sequence index are confounded by construction; the InSight counterfactual separates artifact-from-time but not artifact-from-institution, and at nine-to-eleven observations a fourth program-direction term is not separately estimable, so the directed program is a live rival the design cannot adjudicate at this n.

source: Mazzucato, Mission-oriented innovation policies: challenges and opportunities, Industrial and Corporate Change (2018)

source: Kattel & Mazzucato, Mission-oriented innovation policy and dynamic capabilities in the public sector, Industrial and Corporate Change (2018)


claim: A lever's measured value was realized inside a public lead-investor program that bore the pre-commercial risk and built the propositional base, so reading gamma as the standalone price of TRN prices the artifact while silently assuming the institution is free; the honest packaging downgrades the gamma reading from price of the lever to price of the lever as produced inside the directed program.

source: Mazzucato & Semieniuk, Public financing of innovation: new questions, Oxford Review of Economic Policy (2017)

source: Edler & Fagerberg, Innovation policy: what, why, and how, Oxford Review of Economic Policy (2017)

facet: economics


claim: Codified prescriptive knowledge is a public good only if the public retains the upside (IP, equity, royalty, reinvestment); H1's extensible claim is therefore conditional on a provenance audit the design never runs. Partial public evidence shows the Mars 2020 LVS/TRN codification is predominantly agency-authored and reused across NASA testbeds, supporting extensible-as-retained-public-asset for the TRN lever, but no affiliation classification has been run for GuidedEntry or RangeTrigger, so for those two levers extensible is an assumption rather than a finding.

source: Mazzucato & Li, The Entrepreneurial State and Public Options (risk-reward distribution / retained-IP condition)


claim: Ackoff's systems standard holds that a system's defining properties are emergent and destroyed when the whole is divided into independent additive parts, and that improving an extracted part while measuring the wrong whole is suboptimization; valuing the ellipse-shrinking lever in isolation presumes the ellipse is the binding constraint without expanding to the containing MSR/human-Mars architecture that would tell you whether it is.

source: Ackoff, The Future of Operational Research is Past, Journal of the Operational Research Society (1979)

source: Ackoff, Systems thinking and thinking systems / Towards a System of Systems Concepts


claim: The Karlgaard-family reconstructions decompose the Mars descent into coupled hypersonic, atmospheric, and powered phases whose errors propagate in sequence within one descent, so each lever nulls a distinct error-budget term only conditional on the prior phase's state; this is the candidate's own concession (the MSL increment is an inseparable guided-entry-plus-range-trigger bundle) restated as physics, and summed gamma coefficients over GuidedEntry+RangeTrigger+TRN cannot carry the attached mechanistic meaning unless additivity is demonstrated against those budgets.

source: Karlgaard et al., Assessment of the Reconstructed Aerodynamics of the Mars Science Laboratory Entry Vehicle, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets (2014)

source: Inverse Estimation of Mars 2020 Entry Aeroheating Environments Using MEDLI2 Flight Data, AIAA 2022-0550


claim: By Pearl's back-door criterion the structural role of the approach-accuracy term is dispositive and must be declared on an explicit DAG before its coefficient is read: a mediator on the path technology-generation to approach-investment to ellipse must be excluded (conditioning on it biases the technology gamma toward zero, the very small-delta signature read as confirming H1), whereas a true upstream confounder must be included; these are opposite adjustment decisions, so ApproachAccuracy cannot be entered as a control without a justified arrow direction.

source: Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press (2009)

source: Drawing Credible Directed Acyclic Graphs for Causal Inference (2025)


claim: The InSight residual licenses an associational (rung-1) reading only, not the interventional (rung-2) do-evidence the design treats it as: the unguided Phoenix-heritage ballistic entry was chosen because the western Elysium Planitia site was flat and benign and a large ellipse was acceptable, which is treatment assignment as a function of the tolerated outcome (selection on the outcome). To rescue a do-reading the candidate needs a conditional independence (ellipse size independent of entry-type given site-difficulty class and mission-cost class) that closes the selection back-door.

source: Pearl, Causality, 2nd ed., do-operator / ladder-of-causation exposition (2009)

source: InSight site characterization and Assessment of InSight Landing Site Predictions, J. Geophys. Res. Planets (2020)


claim: GuidedEntry and RangeTrigger are 1 for exactly the same two missions, so as columns they are perfectly collinear and only their sum (a single MSL bundle coefficient) is estimable; apportionment requires an observation in which one lever fires without the other, which the census lacks, so the separate signs and the within-bundle magnitude ordering are physical/historical priors dressed as estimates. MSL's Entry Terminal Point Controller modulates bank angle to control range to a safe deploy altitude (a documented mechanism distinct from a discrete range trigger), but its decomposition is external engineering evidence, not an estimate from the nine-point regression.

source: Pearl, Causality, 2nd ed., identification / d-separation (2009)

source: Post-Flight EDL Entry Guidance Performance of the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory Mission, NASA NTRS 20120015817


claim: Both endpoint ellipses derive from a statistical entry/atmosphere reconstruction lineage separated by two decades of IMU/FADS instrumentation, aerodynamic databases, and atmosphere models, so the measuring instrument changed monotonically alongside the technology to be credited; in internal-validity terms this is instrumentation in the dependent variable, an uncontrolled before-after difference confounding capability with redefinition that one technology-off observation cannot close.

source: Karlgaard, Korzun, Schoenenberger, Bonfiglio & Kass, Mars InSight Entry, Descent, and Landing Trajectory and Atmosphere Reconstruction, J. Spacecraft and Rockets (2021)

source: Bernal, Cummins & Gasparrini, Interrupted time series regression for the evaluation of public health interventions, Int. J. Epidemiology (2017)


claim: The InSight site was assessed and selected on engineering-safety / surface-property grounds (flatness, slope, regolith), so site-selection latitude co-varies with ellipse size independently of guidance technology; the approach-accuracy control fixes injection accuracy but leaves site-selection latitude free, so it does not close the selection-on-the-outcome rival, and the InSight residual is suggestive rather than dispositive.

source: A Pre-Landing Assessment of Regolith Properties at the InSight Landing Site, Space Science Reviews (2018)

source: Golombek et al., Selection of the InSight Landing Site, Space Science Reviews 211 (2016)


claim: The canonical remedy for a single interrupted observation is an interrupted time series with a comparison series, which differences a shared secular trend and instrument drift out; the candidate's identification rests on one decoupling point (InSight) plus an in-model approach-accuracy covariate used as a regressor inside the same census rather than as an external series to difference against, so the shared monotone trend is never actually removed.


claim: Tianwen-1 (2021) flew guided entry in the modern era and has a reconstructed entry/atmosphere trajectory and a landing site positioned in Utopia Planitia to about 1.56 m, so it is a usable second technology-discordant observation (mirror image of InSight) that would convert the single-case discrimination into a two-point comparison surviving the loss of either point; holding it out leaves the strongest available identification on the table absent a documented reconstruction-convention non-comparability.

source: Wei, Rao, Chen, Wang & Zou, Tianwen-1 Mars entry vehicle trajectory and atmosphere reconstruction preliminary analysis, Astrodynamics (2022)

source: Wang, Wang, Zhang, Hua & Li, Landing site positioning and descent trajectory reconstruction of Tianwen-1 on Mars, Astrodynamics (2022)


claim: The reconstruction methodology demonstrably changed across the graded missions: the statistical-estimation technique for Mars EDL reconstruction was itself a subject of comparative methodological study, and the late-mission dependent variable (MEDLI2 on Mars 2020) is a distinct, more capable sensor suite than what supported earlier reconstructions, so the measuring instrument co-evolved with the treatment and the reconstruction-precision change must be netted out rather than allowed to load on the gamma coefficients.

source: Comparison of Statistical Estimation Techniques for Mars EDL Reconstruction, AIAA (2012)

source: Karlgaard et al., Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation 2 Trajectory, Aerodynamics, and Atmosphere Reconstruction, J. Spacecraft and Rockets (2023)


claim: The reachable-and-safe site set is a constructible per-mission measure: Mars 2020 TRN via the Lander Vision System cleared hazardous terrain at Jezero by building an onboard reference map from MRO/CTX imagery and diverting from hazards within the ellipse, so sites cleared by the EDL system is a real countable quantity that moves discontinuously (a site goes from un-attemptable to attemptable) precisely where a smooth log-area contraction cannot represent the change, making ellipse area a node-level proxy that severs the site-difficulty-by-precision interaction.

source: Johnson et al., Mars 2020 Lander Vision System Flight Performance, AIAA SciTech (2022)

source: Cheng et al., Making an Onboard Reference Map From MRO/CTX Imagery for Mars 2020 Lander Vision System, Earth and Space Science (2021)


claim: The Mars 2020 Safe Target Selection algorithm selected the safe landing target within a reachable region from the onboard Safe Targets Map handed to MSL-heritage powered descent, so its objective is hazard/reachability geometry rather than a science-tolerance ellipse; the future MSR-retrieval and human-Mars jobs are fixed-point/hazard-bounded jobs different in kind, and a divergence between the design-ellipse contraction and the PDS achieved-miss series is the in-data signal that a gamma is hired for the science-ellipse job and may not recur on a hit-the-tube job.

source: Dutta et al., Mars 2020 Perseverance EDL GNC Safe Target Selection Reconstruction, NASA NTRS 20230005646 (2021)


claim: TRN/LVS heritage from the Mars 2020 vehicle propagated into relevant-environment test campaigns and closed-loop precision-landing testbeds beyond the originating EDL (relevant-environment TRN tests, COBALT/ALHAT closed-loop terrestrial flights, LiDAR-inertial precision landing), the cross-program reuse signature of a spillover-generating lever; the candidate's design has not coded these TechPort infusion edges, so the learning rate as built cannot certify any lever as directional rather than path-dependent.

source: Real-time Terrain Relative Navigation Test Results from a Relevant Environment, NASA NTRS 20160009627

source: COBALT GN&C payload ALHAT closed-loop flights, NASA NTRS 20170009437