"Faster, better, cheaper" approach
NASA management philosophy
The "faster, better, cheaper" approach (FBC) was a management philosophy adopted by NASA under Administrator Daniel Goldin (1992–2001). Following the end of the Cold War and facing budget constraints, NASA sought to reduce mission costs and development time while maintaining scientific capabilities through smaller, more focused missions and increased use of commercial technologies.
History
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. Goldin had experience with small satellites, and especially disliked long, expensive programmes, calling them "battlestar galacticas", like the Cassini mission that he threatened to cancel, 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:
Faster applies to project development time, which for convenience can be defined as the period from project approval to launch. Rapid development cycles help control costs and enable the incorporation of the latest advances in technology, because the design freeze date is closer to the launch date. Better applies to the capability of the flight system as a scientific instrument, improvement here is based on the use of advanced technologies, and on better-focused science based on the knowledge gained
from earlier exploration missions. Finally, cheaper denotes both lower cost per mission and, through clever design and use of technology, more effective use of available funds.
The public source identifies “"Faster, better, cheaper" approach” as nASA management philosophy. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Faster, better and cheaper.
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This entry incorporates text from “"Faster, better, cheaper" approach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.