Word: cheaper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More than 200 countries make up the world--and it's still fraying. But the Internet is now the medium for imperium, as electronic democracy links even tyrannies with an increasingly World Wide Web. As chips grow cheaper, the new have-nots are the technologically under-served. What spark can pull the global plug...
Classified ads--and the newspapers that heavily rely on them for revenue--are also vulnerable. An eBay listing is cheaper; there's no limit on length; you can include a photo; and it reaches far more people than any newspaper...
...sending machines across 50 million miles of empty space to an alien world would be naive. But trying to do it in a slapdash fashion doesn't help. "There's a difference," grouses John Pike, a space expert with the Federation of American Scientists, "between cheap and cheaper...
...advantages to the faster-cheaper-better approach, in fact, is that when probes inevitably do fail, the loss is relatively small. Mars Observer, which vanished without a trace just before Goldin took office, cost the nation more than $1 billion; Climate Orbiter and the Polar Lander have set taxpayers back only $319 million between them. "We launched 10 spacecraft in 10 months," said Goldin. "We used to launch two a year. We have to be prepared for failure if we're going to explore...
Even NASA's critics agree that doing things faster, better and cheaper makes sense--if it's done right. Says Pike: "This should provide an opportunity for a midcourse correction." Some sort of correction may already be under way. Goldin has launched a new investigation to look into the Polar Lander loss, and NASA chief of space science Edward Weiler said last week the agency would rethink its ambitious schedule of sending multiple missions to Mars every 26 months through 2007. After years of tipping the other way, "better" may finally be getting the same attention as "faster" and "cheaper...