American Decades
Space
NASA.
Facing criticisms early in the decade that his agency was wasting money, Daniel S. Goldin, director for most of the 1990s of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, announced that NASA would find ways to do more with less. His management mantra was "faster, better, cheaper." NASA had great successes during the decade, including the Mars Pathfinder Lander, built for a tenth of the cost of its predecessors and hailed as a huge success. In addition, NASA returned American hero John Herschel Glenn Jr., the first American to orbit the Earth, to space in 1998, to a surge of public approval. The space agency, however, did suffer some humiliating losses during the decade. The $194 million Mars Polar Lander, with the Deep Space 2 Probe, was launched on 3 January 1999 and lost on 3 December. Worse, perhaps, was the catastrophic failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter, launched 11 December 1998 and lost in September 1999. The...
[The entire page is 1617 words long]
1990's Science and Technology
