With NASA under fire for losing the Mars Polar Lander and other recent space missions, what is the fate of NASA Administrator Dan Goldin’s "faster, better, cheaper" approach to space exploration? For a perspective, SPACE.com’s Andrew Chaikin talked to space historian Howard McCurdy, professor of public affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. The conversation took place immediately following the release of a report of the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team (MPIAT). The report is critical of NASA and aerospace contractors for mismanagement and inadequate testing of the spacecraft before launch.

CHAIKIN: It’s a cultural problem?

MCCURDY: There are two cultures in NASA and the aerospace industry. One is the so-called "pick two" culture. That you can have faster, better, cheaper -- but you can’t have all three [together]; you get to pick any two.

The "pick any two" culture is the dominant culture in the aerospace industry. And there’s a substantial number of people within NASA who still believe that when you want to have a cheaper spacecraft, you’d have less performance, and if you want more performance, you have to spend more money.

CHAIKIN: Don’t you think Dan Goldin and the others at NASA understood that when they started faster, better, cheaper at NASA? If you’re stating that "pick any two" is a fact of life, didn’t Dan Goldin understand that’s a fact of life?

MCCURDY: No, it’s not a fact of life. It is possible. There are two cultures. The second culture is the culture that dominates the new information-age industries -- like Microsoft -- which is, you can simultaneously improve cost, schedule and performance.

CHAIKIN: So this is not just NASA.

MCCURDY: This is the whole new information-age society. It’s why Microsoft was so much better, 20 years ago, than IBM: Microsoft could simultaneously shorten schedules, cut costs and improve performance. And IBM, the slow, ponderous bureaucracy couldn’t. So we know from experience it can be done.

Howard McCurdy, professor of public affairs at American University in Washington, D.C.

We even know from within NASA, from the experience there, with spacecraft like Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), and Mars Pathfinder, and New Millennium 1, and Deep Space 1 that you can do these things.

So you have these two contesting cultures. A lot of people get assigned to these projects who believe in the old culture. And from their point of view, "You ask us to spend too little money, we’re just gonna shove you a poorly tested, under-performance spacecraft that probably has a higher propensity to fail." That was clearly the case with some of the earlier failures, where there were oversights that would hardly ever occur on a project that was managed under the old style of management.

CHAIKIN: What’s an example of one of those failures?

MCCURDY: The best example would be the Lewis [Earth-observing] satellite. Which was, I think…the first failure in faster, better cheaper. The flight navigation team, which was an industry team, went home when the spacecraft was out of control. And when they came back, the batteries were run down and they couldn’t recover.

There was this attitude that, "Hey, if you want us to run it cheap, we’re gonna run it cheap, and you’re just going to have to live with a loss in performance."

Well this drives advocates of "faster, better, cheaper" crazy; they know in principle that they’re right. If you use the right management techniques and you do the correct engineering, and you do the testing that is necessary -- and you don’t under-fund the project! In concept, it is a workable system. It works in Microsoft, it works at Digital Domain, it works at Intel, it worked for Mars Pathfinder.

CHAIKIN: Do you feel that you know what went wrong with the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, as opposed to Pathfinder, which succeeded and had that kind of small team that you’re talking about?

MCCURDY: In order, organizationally, to make "faster, better, cheaper" work, you’ve got to have a very smart team. Not everybody on it has to be experienced and smart, but the team as a whole has to be a problem-solving team that is small and highly capable.

CHAIKIN: One of the things that [Pathfinder Project Manager] Tony Spear says is that it has to be fun.

There are…principles [that] are necessary to carry out a "faster, better, cheaper" project. They concern project organization, they concern your use of technology and the techniques that you use to control risk.

CHAIKIN: What are some of these principles?

MCCURDY: One is you’ve got to co-locate the team. Now some people think you can do this electronically. I prefer physically. You’ve got to have the team in one place, because its ability to solve problems is based upon the ability of team members to communicate freely with one another.

That’s exactly what went wrong with the Mars Climate Orbiter. There were two separate teams where people weren’t communicating well enough with each other, to discover that one group was speaking English (measurements) and the other group was speaking metric. If they’d been in the same room for any period of time, somebody would have realized you were speaking in different languages, and corrected that problem.

Another principle would be extensive testing. The foundation of that is having the spacecraft in the hands of the project-development team half way through the development cycle. So if you’re on a three-year cycle, everything’s delivered, fabricated, ready to test after a year and a half, which is a tremendous time constraint.

The main failure in the case of Polar Lander is inadequate testing. They were under time constraints and cost constraints that caused them not to do the testing that would normally be necessary. And apparently with the Deep Space 2 microprobes, the report says that they flew them before they were ready. So extensive testing is a tremendous risk-mitigation technique.

Now I’m gonna give you a fourth, and I'll stop there: Seamless management. What that means is that the people who fly the spacecraft are the people who designed it. So, you don’t have the added communication problems that are created when you have an industry-built spacecraft being passed to a government navigation team. The government navigation team isn’t familiar enough with the spacecraft to know what its idiosyncrasies are, and that’s a problem that occurred on the Mars Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter.

CHAIKIN: How common is that? At JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), I was hearing people say that that was the exception rather than the rule in planetary exploration. It happened with Pathfinder, but that was rare.

MCCURDY: That’s right, it’s rare! Well, if you want to fly faster, better, cheaper and get all three, it can’t be rare.

And of course, NASA has this traditional culture, going back to the 50s and 60s, that says that industry has to build everything we do, or nearly everything we do. Well, okay, you can have industry teams, but then they have to be seamless. You don’t want to pass off a spacecraft that has been designed by a very small group of people, operating without conventional systems-management safeguards. The alternative is the have the systems-management safeguards, go back to [the management style of] Project Apollo, and spend a kettle full of money.

CHAIKIN: What can NASA do now to make sure that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again?

MCCURDY: It’s a problem of implementation. The people who know how to do this, when they try to do it, run into a traditional culture that is resistant to the idea that you can really make it work.

CHAIKIN: Do you think NASA can change, the way it needs to change, to make this stuff happen?

MCCURDY: Change or go out of business. Isn’t that what happens in the new information age? If you’re a dot-com company and you don’t change, where are you going to be next year? You’re out of business!

So there’s this whole cultural transformation that’s taking place within NASA around the issue, and it does boil down to these two cultures: to "pick any two" culture, and the culture that says, "no, no, no, you can do 'faster, better, cheaper,' if you organize it the right way."