You’re looking at it with hindsight. Sure it feels like spending another million $ designing, testing, and adding additional weight, along with removing weight from other parts looks like the right decision now.

Every design makes compromises, and every failure looks stupid when looking at the end result. The team had decisions to make and if they had the extra time and money, then making the existing design more robust with more testing and reliability would have been the better solution.

Good explanation. People that design space missions have a lot of restrictions, and things that seem obvious on the surface can cause a lot of problems in practice.

Weight. That’s the only actual answer.

It’s extremely expensive to send weight to the moon, everything you list is more weight.

It’s actually not, because the exit condition is “when you get the joke”