Indeed, both failures seem to a large extent to be connected with cost-cutting measures. The failure review board for the Mars Climate Orbiter made it clear that the initial error -- confusing Newtons with pounds in a single software program -- would not have led to disaster if the mission's directors had not passed up opportunity after opportunity to catch it; and that oversight was due very largely to the fact that the mission team was drastically shrunken compared to that of previous JPL missions.

The two Viking missions were run by a team of 400 members; Mars Observer had 130; the two 1998 missions together had a team of only 80 people. MCO's navigation team consisted of exactly one full-time member -- and, as the Board pointed out, many team members didn't even have an entirely clear idea of just what their exact role even was.

As for Mars Polar Lander, we don't know what the cause of its disappearance was, and may never know -- but that ignorance is itself due to the fact that, in order to cut costs, JPL designed the spacecraft without any ability to transmit to Earth at all during the entire landing sequence. The agency simply gambled that the craft would succeed, and that a post-mortem wouldn't be necessary.

And while the failure may well have been due to a simple crash onto a boulder or a gully, the MCO failure review board had already apprehensively listed two possible problems with the Lander's descent engines that might perhaps cause it to fail.

One of them -- the apparent lack of adequate heating for the engines -- seems to have been the direct result of negligence by the design team of a sort that never occurred on a previous JPL mission, and which was very likely connected with the downsizing of the design effort.

The other -- the Board's fear that the Lander's new pulse-modulated engine landing technique had not been adequately tested and simulated -- was also connected with a too-small design effort, directly linked to the project's small cost.

And an embarrassing number of other "better-faster-cheaper" missions have either failed, or come close to failure, for reasons that seem linked to cost-cutting.

Asleep at the Wheel
NASA's "Lewis" satellite to test Earth resources mapping technology failed because -- astonishingly -- the entire control crew decided soon after it reached orbit that its proper functioning was certain and went home for the night, leaving not a single person in the control room during the period when the satellite malfunctioned in a way which could very easily have been corrected had anyone known it was happening.

Johns Hopkins' NEAR asteroid probe -- the very first NASA better-faster-cheaper mission-- almost failed during its first attempt to rendezvous with the asteroid Eros last December because its operators had completely failed to consider or test the possibility that its engine might start a little more forcefully than expected, although this problem is common with rocket engines.

The craft's software was unable to react properly to this event and shut down the engine, which -- for still puzzling reasons -- then caused the craft to undergo a serious attitude-control malfunction which caused it to waste maneuvering fuel. Its rendezvous has now been delayed until February 2000 -- and if it fails, there won't be enough fuel for a third try.

And Clementine -- the Defense Department probe to test Star Wars technology at a minimum price -- succeeded during the early Moon-orbiting part of its mission, but malfunctioned and was lost only a few days later because of a software design error that was directly attributed to over-economizing.

So: have we overdone it? Is better-faster-cheaper wrong? The answer lies in the fact that the "B.F.C." design philosophy can actually be split into two separate parts. One of these is indeed wrong -- and it is a direct consequence of larger and more serious problems with NASA -- but the other is still completely valid and definitely should not be dropped.

The valid part of the "BFC" philosophy can be summed up in one word: smaller. Elementary common sense suggests that, if possible, any large multi-experiment unmanned space mission should be broken up into smaller spacecraft -- so that if one craft fails because of a design error (which is very often the case), less is lost.

Even if several craft are launched at the same time and one fails, it is often possible to develop new procedures -- sometimes on very short notice -- for the remaining craft to follow that may save them.

Obviously there does come a point of diminishing returns on this: if you break a mission up into a swarm of small spacecraft, each with only one instrument on board, the ground teams will be seriously overburdened trying to track and control all of them at the same time.

But it usually does make sense to break up one very large and expensive multi-instrument spacecraft into several smaller and cheaper ones, if possible. And if (as is also often the case) one small craft makes a new scientific discovery, small craft launched later can have their experiments modified to follow up on it.

For example the Galileo spacecraft's instruments were selected all the way back in late 1977 -- which meant that they could not be modified to follow up on the astonishing discoveries that the Voyagers made about Io and Europa only a few years later. If Galileo had ben planned as a set of two or three smaller missions, the Jupiter atmospheric probe would undoubtedly have been launched first -- providing time for experiments on the later Jupiter orbiters to be modified.

The Money Shuttle
Why wasn't this done in the Eighties? Again, the answer can be summed up in one word: Shuttle. NASA (barely) persuaded Congress and the Nixon Administration to approve the Shuttle in the first place in 1972 (and thus maintain the agency's high funding levels) only by telling them deliberate and outrageous exagerations about its low cost and high flight rate.

As one former NASA official told a "Time" magazine reporter in 1986: "We hated to do it, but we were getting so many votes." It then used the "Camel's Nose" technique to keep the Shuttle program going: each year it slightly raised its estimate of the Shuttle's cost and slightly lowered its estimate of its effectiveness, while at the same time telling Congress that if it didn't approve the program the funds already spent would have been wasted. It has used exactly the same technique to keep the Space Station program going.

But part of this stratagem required that NASA discourage any competition from smaller expendable rockets that might be marketed by private companies -- and part of the effort to do this involved deliberately making its scientific spacecraft so big and heavy that they could only be launched on the Shuttle. At the time NASA actually bragged about this, and referred to these as "flagship" missions.

After Challenger blew up and the entire long deception scheme collapsed, some missions which had already been approved had undergone enough initial design work already that the agency decided to maintain them in their large form.

In the area of planetary exploration, these included - besides the already-built Galileo - Mars Observer and Cassini. Cassini, so far, has worked for two straight years with eerie perfection; but there are still five years to go before it even reaches Saturn, plenty of time for a disaster to strike -- and if it does fail, almost $3 billion will go down the drain at one time. Mars Observer, of course, did fail -- a single part failure that lost $1 billion and eight experiments.

New administrator Daniel Goldin to his credit, did call a halt to any further nonsense of this sort -- and, indeed, there was no point in continuing it, since the government had already forced NASA to give up its Shuttle monopoly on spacecraft launches.

The results can be seen in the Mars program, despite its misfortunes. All of the four Mars missions that the U.S. has flown since then (five, if you count Deep Space-2 separately) have cost a total of $836 million -- less than Mars Observer -- and two of them have succeeded spectacularly and provided a wealth of new data about the planet.

When Mars Climate Orbiter failed, it cost only one-fourth as much as Mars Observer and dragged only one reflown Mars Observer experiment to its doom. This strategy should unquestionably be continued.

But there is a second component to the Better-Faster-Cheaper missions that is not working -- namely, the other cost-cutting efforts associated with them. NASA, quite simply, is trying to do too much with too little money.

Again, this is a direct result of the agency's chronic dishonesty during its funding requests. At least since the start of the Shuttle program, it has regularly understated to Congress and the White House the amount of money it needs to accomplish tasks.

The Camel's Nose
Often the same Camel's Nose technique has allowed it to rake in considerable additional funds over several years to finish the projects more realistically -- but the patience of Congress and the White House with this has shrunk over the years, and NASA has for some time been desperately cutting corners and running risks in the gamble that the projects will work anyway.

The results of this sort of foolish economizing have not been limited to small and relatively cheap projects. The Challenger disaster was a direct result of the fact that NASA, throughout the Shuttle program, had been frantically cutting corners and ignoring problems in order to try to keep the Shuttle launch rate as high as it was publicly promising at the time.

It had been known for years that the Shuttle's brakes were dangerously inadequate, but the agency did not even dare to stop the program long enough to fix them -- and it did the same thing with the somewhat subtler problem of leaks in the solid boosters.

On the very day of the Challenger launch, of course, it made the decision to launch on a dangerously cold day, precisely -- and openly -- because not doing so would have held up its overcrowded launch schedule for the year. The inadequate testing of the Hubble Telescope mirror was another direct result of the same phenomenon -- and even since 1986 the phenomenon has continued, both in regard to the Space Station and in NASA's other programs.

NASA's continuing frantic over-economizing to cover up its initial dishonest cost underestimates was certainly reflected in the 1998 Mars Surveyor missions, as I noted at the start of this article.

I have no doubt that some honest attempts were made to modify the organizational structure of the JPL programs to cut out genuinely unnecessary duplication and spending -- but clearly the cost cuts were too large, and they led to disaster on both missions, as they have on some other "BFC" missions.

No doubt there has been some genuine, wishful self-deception on the part of NASA regarding its ability to carry out these projects so cheaply, but the results have been the same in any case.

But exactly the same problem is still being reflected in such large projects as the Shuttle and the Space Station.

I have little doubt that the maintenance problems that have held up the Shuttle program so seriously this year are, again, the result of excessive cost-cutting -- and the problem is occurring throughout the Space Station program - which may well be headed for disaster some time next year.

What can be done? Well, it won't be done by NASA itself. The agency -- like any government agency given the chance -- will continue to pull deception after deception to try to maximize its own funding levels. Reform must come from outside NASA -- for a Congress and a White House which at long last resolve no longer to be deceived by NASA as monotonously as Lucy deceives Charlie Brown with that football.

What is really needed is a NASA Administrator who is, frankly, anti-NASA -- willing to make massive cuts in its unjustified programs (which, to be blunt, would include most of the current manned space program -- that is, most of NASA's current funding), and to stop misleading Congress and come clean with the realistic costs of its projects.

One other possible change that might make a difference would be a reduction in Congress' willingness to fund NASA programs on a year-by-year basis, and greater insistence on its part that they should be funded as a single lump sum, with the project being completely cancelled if NASA's initial cost estimate proves too low.

Goldin has, in fact, instituted this policy in a small way within NASA -- the "Clark" Earth-resources satellite, shortly after the failure of its partner "Lewis", was cancelled because it was exceeding its original total project cost estimate -- but it needs to be instituted in a tremendously bigger way, and this can only be done by a Congress and a White House that have lost patience.

Whether they will ever conjure up the determination to do so is still highly doubtful, but it looks a lot more likely than it did last year. The Clinton Administration might very well have cancelled the Space Station, had it not been persuaded by Goldin that it could serve as a foreign-aid project to keep unemployed Russian aerospace engineers from peddling their talents to hostile countries -- a scheme which has also collapsed. It would have been cheaper and more cost-effective to bribe the Russian engineers directly.

With only a year left, this Administration will certainly never bite the bullet and admit its mistake -- but its successor, Democratic or Republican, might well do so, particularly if 2000 turns out to a disastrous year for the Space Station.

The argument is put forth that, even if such cuts are made, it won't guarantee any additional funding for NASA's less spectacular unmanned space science and technology programs -- but then, why should it? Those projects will always have to make the cases for themselves separately.

At any rate, I hope it will eventually become clear to NASA that, in the long run, honesty is the best policy when arguing the case for a space project -- and that honesty includes an honest estimate of the amount of money needed to make it succeed.

If that isn't done, no lesser solution will alleviate the problem -- least of all a proposal to return to the days of bloated "flagship" missions that put all of NASA's eggs in one basket.

But what changes should we make, specifically, in NASA's unmanned Mars exploration program in the wake of the disaster of '98? In the third and last part of this report, I'll give my opinions on that subject.