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Space

Where are they boldly going?

Nature volume 408, pages 898–899 (2000)Cite this article

NASA administrator Dan Goldin could hardly have started 2000 in a worse mood. After the embarrassing loss of two Mars missions in a row, the second just three weeks before Christmas, the space agency braced itself for a long winter of fact-finding reports, congressional hearings and what-went-wrong news stories.

What had gone wrong, it turned out, was the application of Goldin's 'faster, better, cheaper' slogan, NASA's guiding principle for much of the 1990s. Even before the last report landed on Goldin's desk, the lesson was clear: his troops had been focusing on cheaper and faster at the expense of better.

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References

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Authors
  1. Tony Reichhardt
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Reichhardt, T. Where are they boldly going?. Nature 408, 898–899 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35050245

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