MISSION TO MARS
Nearly two decades after the Viking was successfully launched and put in Mars, NASA were ready to launch their second major mission to Mars with Mars Observer (MO) at a cost of nearly 1 billion dollars and more than a decade of preparation. This was a complete disaster after the controllers lost contact with the spacecraft three days prior to its deceleration into Mars’ Orbit. The losses incurred were of gigantic proportions and NASA could not afford any more failures. This made them rethink their approach towards space exploration and they eventually came up with the philosophy of FBC (Faster, Better, Cheaper). The aim of this approach was to change the way they worked on space exploration. Instead of spending billions of dollars and decades of effort in coming up with one spacecraft which has a lot of functionalities, FBC aimed at creating smaller and specific missions with strict constraints in money and time. The idea was to diversify the risk across multiple smaller projects rather than laying all the eggs in a single basket. This approach forced the developers to come up with innovative, out of the box solutions to cut down the costs. Another advantage in this approach is that the failure of a mission will not be as catastrophic as before. This really paid off on the first mission when Pathfinder was successfully launched into Mars within the specified constraints. However, things started getting awry when the challenge bar was raised too high. With the success of Pathfinder, many more functionalities were imposed on the next mission within the same time frame. In addition, resources allotted to this project were simultaneously working on other projects as well. This put a lot of pressure on the employees. An important factor attributed to the success of Pathfinder is the extensive testing that it went through prior to its launch.