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Daniel Goldin

Daniel Goldin, wearing glasses, a suit, and a red tie with a NASA pin, stands against a dark background.

NASA's longest-serving Administrator, in post from April 1992 to November 2001. Goldin pushed the agency away from expensive Viking-style flagship missions toward smaller, cheaper, more frequent probes — the doctrine known as faster, better, cheaper. The 1999 loss of both Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander was widely read as the limit case of that policy, and it never fully recovered its political cover afterward.

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