Resilience through performance auditing? Lessons from NASA's Faster, Better, Cheaper era

Purpose This study seeks to ascertain the ways in which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Faster, Better, Cheaper (FBC) management philosophy of the 1990s might be considered as a form of performance auditing (PA) and to what extent it may have contributed to organisational resilience. Design/methodology/approach We situate NASA's FBC managerial philosophy within a case study framework, investigating both its alignment with PA principles and its impact on organisational resilience. We draw on archival sources, including NASA publications, academic literature and popular commentary, for analysis and insight. Findings Our findings suggest that although FBC could not be construed as synonymous with PA, it selectively adopted certain PA-like logics, particularly those related to economy, efficiency and performance framing, while omitting the core PA features of independence, external scrutiny and effectiveness-oriented evaluation. However, PA-related concepts, even when selectively or incompletely applied, can nevertheless influence organisational resilience. Originality/value By analysing how PA principles were mobilised and adapted in a space sector decision-making context, the study extends PA scholarship into the under-examined domain of space sector governance and demonstrates how PA-informed logics operate in environments characterised by uncertainty, innovation pressures and mission-critical risk to foster organisational resilience while maintaining accountability.