OPINION NASA's budget and its new administrator's statements are evoking a ghost from the agency's past: Faster, better, cheaper. The agency closed out the last century with a near decade-long experiment in doing more with less. Administrator Dan Goldin championed the philosophy as NASA faced criticism that its flagship programs, including the Cassini mission to Saturn, demanded years of development and billion of dollars. Was there another way? The answer in the 1990s, was Faster, better, cheaper: run several smaller missions in the time it once took to build a big one, and lean on private industry to drive down costs. Fast forward a quarter of a century and it sounds like the US space agency is retreading old ground. The problem with the methodology was risk. After a run of successes, including the Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor missions, NASA suffered a string of failures.…