"What we're finding is that we should do things faster, better and not so cheap," said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a 30-year student of America's space program. "We seem to be accepting too many risks on the basis of the cost."

Or does a failure of MPL -- comparatively low in cost at $120 million -- demonstrate that when a mission is inherently risky, it's better to have a cheap disappointment than an expensive catastrophe?

"'Better, faster, cheaper' is here because we can't afford anything else," said Wes Huntress, NASA's associate administrator for space science from 1993 to 1998, now at the Washington-based Carnegie Institute.

Huntress said overall "better, faster, cheaper" has brought "spectacular" successes, such as the Lunar Prospector, Deep Space 1 and 1997 Mars Pathfinder missions.

Or, as NASA itself maintains, is it just too early to tell?

"We should hold off on all our post-game analysis until NASA has a chance to implement all the contingency options," said White House spokesman Joe Lockhart on Monday. "If they are not able to do that this evening, it does not bode well," he said.

It would not bode well for "faster, better, cheaper" if the entire mission were deemed a loss. But the possible source of the problem would be more important than the fate of the MPL.

A failure to convert between metric and English units condemned the Polar Lander's sister ship, the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) to an unexpected end in September. A review board determined that a lack of training contributed to the problem.

In other words, the problem may not be with the "cheaper" part, but with the "faster" part.

"Everybody comes to this resource issue and presumes that you need more money, but it's not necessarily the case," Huntress said. In the MCO failure, it was more process than money, he said.

"I think the big issue here is time," Huntress said.

"My speculation is that every mission like this there is a statistical probability of failure," said House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R.-California), who supports the idea of small, cheap missions. "Now we might also find that human error is to blame for failure. If that turns out to be the case, it will mean some real problems for NASA. You can't have human failure twice in a row and expect to keep people's confidence."

Logsdon said that while the conversion error that doomed MCO did not have much to do with cost-saving, the Polar Lander was clearly lacking some systems that could have been helpful if NASA had spent the money.

"There could have been a hazard avoidance system on the spacecraft, so that if it was approaching an unacceptable landing site, it had room to maneuver," Logsdon said. "There could have been communications systems that would have given you information all the way down. This way, we're left totally in the dark as to what happened, so we don't even know what to fix on the next missions."

Although the new system of smaller, cheaper missions has proven more effective, a string of recent problems threatens to turn this positive trend on its head, said Todd Mosher, manager of spacecraft architecture at The Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit group that researches space issues.

Mosher conducted an analysis for a paper that he will deliver at Johns Hopkins University next year that will evaluate the pros and cons of 'faster, better, cheaper' for planetary missions. "There might be a point that we get to where you get greater risk than you're paying for," he said.

NASA press staff refused to comment on the mission's impact on policy, saying that the outcome was still uncertain.

Extreme cost saving is coming under fire in other space sectors too. A recent Defense Department review of five rocket failures between August 1998 and May 1999 found that government contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing were trying to do too much with too little resources and needed more training for crucial technical staff.

"For 'cheaper, better, faster' in space launch, the route to true 'cheaper' is 'better' -- high reliability," the report said.

But the idea is still sound, its adherents maintain. When Mars Observer was lost in 1993, NASA had already dropped a billion dollars -- and all its scientific hopes -- into the project. The price tag for the climate orbiter and MPL combined totals only $235 million.

"You've got to expect a certain amount of failures in your space missions," Rohrabacher said. "If you do a multitude of missions, it's better than if you put all of your resources in one basket."

"I hope it does give pause to some people who are still trying to maneuver us into a hyper-expensive manned mission," Rohrabacher said.

Logsdon said NASA should either have more money or fewer responsibilities. Since the end of the space race, he said, the nation has not really figured out what it wants from its space program. The NASA budget has remained flat, while its missions, such as the expensive International Space Station, have expanded.

"It seems to have settled into a $13-and-a-half billion niche," he said, "and science seems to have gotten the short end of the stick."

In the end, though, the MPL mission will not make or break NASA, despite its high visibility. Plans for future Mars missions are still on track, and the agency's other programs continue.

A definite failure of the mission "is certainly a reason to be upset and concerned," Rohrabacher said, "but it's not the same catastrophe it would be if it was a billion-dollar-plus project."

"We've got a shuttle launch in two days to go up and fix the Hubble, and hopefully that will take some of the sting out of this," Logsdon said. "This is just a bump in the road rather than anything else."