Letter from the Editor
Mars is a business.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the old way of doing things--huge
budgets, packing every instrument and science experiment desired onto a
spacecraft, and placing all the risk into a large, one-time shot at space--is
over.
Even Cassini, the last of the billion-dollar projects to be built at JPL,
is in the mode of NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's "better, faster,
cheaper". And the Mars program as a whole is a model for the rest of
the agency on how to implement this idea.
Mars, in addition to its power to excite us as a planet and place of exploration,
presents a unique chance to test our ideas for "better" missions
that exploit the incredible promise of Mars, the ability to be "faster",
propelled by the goal of a mission every opportunity, and the restriction
of being "cheaper", by imposing severe cost constraints on each
mission.
We are "pathfinding": the agency and you, the gentle readers of
this publication, are looking to us to make it a success.
--David Dubov