OPINION NASA’s budget and its new administrator’s statements are evoking a ghost from the agency’s past: Faster, better, cheaper.
The agency closed out the last century with a near decade-long experiment in doing more with less. Administrator Dan Goldin championed the philosophy as NASA faced criticism that its flagship programs, including the Cassini mission to Saturn, demanded years of development and billion of dollars. Was there another way?
The answer in the 1990s, was Faster, better, cheaper: run several smaller missions in the time it once took to build a big one, and lean on private industry to drive down costs.
Fast forward a quarter of a century and it sounds like the US space agency is retreading old ground.
The problem with the methodology was risk. After a run of successes, including the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor missions, NASA suffered a string of failures. These included the infamous loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter due to a measurement units error and the Mars Polar Lander, which crashed during its landing attempt.
Whether the philosophy was pushed too far, or whether repeated failure simply proved politically unpalatable, NASA retreated. The Mars rovers and the James Webb Space Telescope stand as monuments to what the old, expensive, methodical approach could achieve.
Now under the Trump administration, NASA is being pushed back toward austerity. New administrator Jared Isaacman wants more missions, more commercial involvement, while also expecting cheaper projects that carry a higher degree of risk.
The commercial environment has changed considerably since the 1990s. SpaceX, for example, has demonstrated that launches can be done relatively cheaply, and its rapid-iteration model has produced real results. But it has also produced real failures: Starship, despite reaching its third major version, is only now approaching the reliability threshold for uncrewed orbital flight.
NASA’s own Space Launch System, meanwhile, remains monstrously expensive and behind schedule, yet it has launched twice – both times successfully – including a crewed lunar flyby.
That contrast captures the core tension. The traditional NASA approach is slow and costly, but it works. Isaacman wants to raise mission cadence while cutting budgets. This is a combination that, given the administration’s fiscal goals, is very difficult to achieve without accepting a higher failure rate and simpler mission profiles.
The original faster, better, cheaper philosophy foundered partly on the stigma of failure. A similar reckoning is coming if Isaacman’s ambitions are to be met. The only real question is what happens when (and it is a when not an if) the first high-profile mission is lost. ®