“Game-changing” and “affordable” are perhaps the most repeated adjectives spoken by NASA officials in the last few months. The premise underlying President Obama’s proposed space policy is that development of new space technologies can speed space exploration at lower costs.
But skeptics in Congress counter that NASA has provided too few details to convince them that they should largely throw away the $10 billion that has been spent so far in NASA’s Constellation moon program and spend billions more on something new.
At a workshop last month in Galveston, members of NASA study teams looking at how to put in effect the Obama policy presented their current thinking to 450 attendees from industry and academia.
The NASA presenters, in describing how the space agency could make it to Mars on a limited budget, said their ideas represented “a point of departure” that would be revised with feedback.
