QUESTION:
Was it hard to make Galileo?

ANSWER from Jose Luis Mancera on January 2, 1995:
Galileo is the most complicated spacecraft designed to date.  Over the
years, there were lots of challenging issues to resolve in designing,
manufacturing, integrating, testing, and operating the spacecraft. 
Although as complicated as it was to make Galileo, it was accomplished by
many talented people with lots of education, ingenuity, hard work, and
dedication.  Similar to the same stuff that you do when you do something
"well done."  This was possible by ongoing communication among the many
participants, carefully documenting the needed changes, and the effects of
these changes, to the existing design. 

Large challenging tasks, can be scheduled in a practical way to maximize the
success of the project.  The funding from government varied, and through the
years, required many redesigns of the spacecraft.  But, as engineers and
scientists, we replanned the mission with the reduced funding - rethinking what
can be done with less funding.  For example, when our large High Gain Antenae
did not deploy (open) fully, we were faced with a difficult situation as to how
to get the science and engineering data back with the reduced telemetry (data
sent to the ground from the spacecraft.)  A tremendous effort was done on the
ground to come up with a new solution.  Well, lots of new Flight Software code
had to be redesigned and tested on the ground before sending it to the
spacecraft so the maximum science data could be processed on the spacecraft;
also, there were many other improvements made on the Deep Space Network - the
ground antennae systems that are used to capture the data.

Yes, making Galileo was a complicated project, but with great dreams,
planning, designing, building, testing, launching, operating, and
personnel dedication, a challenging project can be successful.