Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program (review)

Faster, Better, Cheaper: Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program. By Howard E. McCurdy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii+173. $34.95.

Over the last decade the history of spaceflight has matured as a discipline, moving from traditional project and participant histories into broader studies and analyses. Howard McCurdy's Faster, Better, Cheaper is a fine example of the new scholarship, addressing an important organizational initiative within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Promoted by Dan Goldin, NASA's longest-tenured administrator, the FBC initiative, after which McCurdy's book is titled, was intended to reverse the trend of complex, expensive missions that had dominated NASA's planetary exploration since at least the 1970s.

Because of their tremendous cost, NASA could afford very few such missions, and the loss of any one of them was catastrophic. In the early 1990s, Goldin proposed to roll back some of NASA's bureaucratic engineering traditions, usually called "systems management," and use new technologies to produce capable but much less expensive spacecraft. The results, as McCurdy documents, have been decidedly mixed, with startling early success on missions such as Mars Pathfinder and Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, but then a rash of failures in the late 1990s on systems such as the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander.

Faster, Better, Cheaper is not a traditional historical narrative; rather, it analyzes its namesake initiative using methods of political science, public administration, and sociology, thankfully without all of the jargon. In many ways, Faster, Better, Cheaper is an example of the initiative that McCurdy analyzes so well. Spacecraft built under Goldin's regime were to reduce the number of scientific instruments, eliminate redundant hardware, and use close-knit teamwork to produce a lighter, less-expensive, and rapidly deployed spacecraft. Similarly, McCurdy's book is delightfully short, well-organized, and rapidly produced. Like NASA's smaller spacecraft, which sacrificed some performance and complexity to achieve quick results, it is a fine first-cut analysis, but lacking in the full historical depth that historians of technology frequently bring to their subjects. It provides an outstanding overview of the political, organizational, and technical issues involved. McCurdy introduces the relevant literature, which includes the sociology of complex organizations, public administration, aerospace history, and the history of technology. He then uses these methods, along with his own solid scholarly research and interviews, to assemble a clearly presented analysis.

I found only one technical error, on page 130, where "cross-strapping" is identified as a method appropriate for "single string" design, whereas this is actually a technique for connecting redundant components. For some other topics a deeper treatment might have been useful. As an example, in the discussion of NASA's early economic projections for the space shuttle there is no mention of NASA's X-15 project as an exemplar. The X-15 had been able to achieve rapid turnaround for frequent flights, an important demonstration of the potential of reusable spacecraft. McCurdy provides an excellent description of systems management in chapter 6, but in other places he seems to revert to the simplistic view that it is merely a matter of paperwork. This is a view that the proponents of "faster, better, cheaper" use as a straw man. The real story is far more complex. These, however, are matters that require a much longer book than McCurdy aimed to produce. Overall, the simplifications required for brevity are effective.

All in all, Faster, Better, Cheaper is an excellent overview of Goldin's initiative and of the scholarly literature that bears on the topic. It cannot and does not do everything a historian of technology might desire, but it will undoubtedly be the starting point for a historian to bring forth the deeper contextual treatment that the subject deserves. The book provides insights for both newcomers and old hands to the topic. I highly recommend it...