"Faster, better, cheaper" approach

NASA had a difficult period in the 1990s: with the Cold War and the Space Race between the US and the USSR finished, the agency saw dwindling budgets, and the new NASA administrator, Daniel Goldin, introduced the so-called "faster, better, cheaper" approach in 1992, which encouraged smaller, cheaper missions built with the help of third-party contractors, efficiently "commercializing" the research labs and forcing them to work with industry. and urged for development of small and fast missions. The FBC approach was compared and likely originated from Lockheed Martin's skunk works approach developed by Kelly Johnson. Though it was promoted by NASA and was a de facto operational paradigm during Goldin's tenure, FBC was not institutionalized into NASA policies, being only a set of unwritten ideas. The "faster, better, cheaper" approach was described as: In 1991, Edward C. Stone–a well-known, enthusiastic and respectable scientist, the project scientist of Voyager program–was made the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) director. JPL had little experience in small missions at the time: its "flagship" missions, like Voyager, Cassini, and Galileo, employed hundreds of people for decades. Cassini, for example, "directly supported maybe 500 work-years, about 10 percent of total lab staff [and] provided close to 20 percent of the lab budget". Other missions were less fortunate: in 1998–1999, six missions were launched; four of them failed. After Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, and Deep Space 2 failures, a governmental commission, the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team, was created to investigate the issues that led to it. The commission issued a Mars Program Independent Assessment Team Report, commonly known as the Young Report after its chairman Tom Young. After two Mars spacecraft failed, "the Mars program had retrenched and returned to more conservative and traditional management with significantly more funding": the next mission, Mars Exploration Rover (launched in 2003), was redesigned, and eventually cost around $800 million; as Norman Haynes put it, MER sucked up "all available money from NASA and JPL". == Assessment and legacy ==

"Faster, better, cheaper" philosophy is often criticized, with many opponents saying that one can only "pick two" out of three desired qualities, but even its critics acknowledge that under Goldin the flight rate became higher, and that Goldin "rescued space science from the tedium and inherent risk of flying one giant mission every five or ten years". Nevertheless, the FBC approach was noted by multiple authors to be a success by different criteria. The FBC missions had strict budgets. Mars Pathfinder, together with the Sojourner rover, cost only 6.7 percent of what was spent on the Viking mission. All 16 missions launched in the FBC era cost less than Cassini. Dan Ward from the US Air Force concludes that "FBC delivered 10 successful missions (plus six unsuccessful ones) for less than the price of one traditional mission. ... suggest that success-per-dollar is a more meaningful measurement of achievement than success-per-attempt because there is no limit to the number of attempts we can make" and writes that FBC "reveals an admirable record of success". Another metric which shows that FBC was a successful approach is "the science output per dollar of mission cost": "FBC missions resulted in more scientific publications (and citation-weighted publications) per dollar of mission cost than did missions developed under other paradigms". Dillon and Madsen, 2014 concludes that "NASA suffers from a bias against learning from the FBC era because of the stigma of the failed projects". Giovanni F. Bignami wrote that the "popular belief" is wrong to target the FBC approach, and shows that the percentage of failed missions was not much lower before FBC than during the FBC. Larry J. Paxton thought that FBC "did revitalize science at NASA": during the Goldin administration there were many missions in contrast with the "flagship" Voyager and Galileo. New NASA programs were created, including the Discovery program and Living With a Star. He also wrote that FBC proves that large organizations like NASA can be changed and adapted to the needs of its "customers": "For NASA, that customer base included politicians, scientists, and the public." Daniel Goldin was NASA administrator under three presidents, from 1992 to 2001, the longest tenure of all NASA directors. According to W. Henry Lambright, "he was hailed at one point as a miracle worker and poster boy of government reinvention for his 'faster, better, cheaper' strategy of 'doing more with less'. But Goldin left the agency under fire for cost overruns and reforms that reached too far". The first European planetary mission, the Mars Express orbiter and the Beagle 2 lander, cost only $60 million, and had a "streamlined design and thrift [which] echoes a previous NASA mantra: 'faster, better, cheaper'". ESA described it as "the first example of ESA's new style of developing scientific missions: faster, smarter and more cost-effective, but without compromising reliability and quality". ESA stated that "there was immense pressure on ESA from its Members States to demonstrate similar principles" to FBC. ESA science director David Southwood adapted the FBC as "faster, smarter, cheaper". The orbiter mission succeeded, but the lander failed. European smallsats PROBA were designed according to the FBC principles; the first satellite, PROBA-1, was launched in 2001. == Missions ==

Sources usually mention 16 missions launched during the FBC era, though several more missions are also attributed to it by others. == Further reading ==