The Mars Pathfinder mission began as MESUR (Mars Environmental Survey), a 1991 proposal for a network of as many as 16 Mars landers to perform network science (meteorology and seismology on distributed sites) using nominally inexpensive landers. One prominent approach to reducing the unit cost of the landers was to use a semi-hard landing approach with airbags rather than a retrorocket system. The landing system proposed was sufficiently radical that a technology demonstration/flight validation was designed, originally MESUR Pathfinder, on which work formally began in 1993.

With the loss of Mars Observer and the onset of the Discovery programme in NASA, the Pathfinder concept was ‘adopted’ by the Discovery programme, and became the most widely cited example of the ‘faster, better, cheaper’ (FBC) approach (see McCurdy, 2001). NEAR technically was the first selected Discovery mission, but took rather longer to be built and reach its target. Note also that there were other FBC programmes within NASA, including the Small Explorer Earth orbiters, and the New Millenium technology validation programme. The success of some non-NASA projects like the Clementine moon orbiter, which came out of the Strategic Defense Initiative (the ‘Star Wars’ programme) also set the stage for the FBC era.

As an aside, one viewpoint of the background to the development of Pathfinder is described in Donna Shirley's book Managing Martians (1998). Andrew Mishkin's Sojourner (2004) gives a more detailed but narrower view, of the rover engineering development specifically.