Wednesday, February 07, 2007

the latest Centennial Challenges budget news

RLV News has gone through the Administration's 2008 NASA Budget Proposal and picked out the areas from this massive document related to Centennial Challenges. The 2008 Centennial Challenges proposal is for $4 million, or under 1/4000th of NASA's proposed budget (which in turn is an invisible feather on the total 2008 Federal Budget elephant). Looked at another way, it's a couple hours of Ares I/Orion development. The document suggests that new challenges will be issued in areas like Solar Sails, Micro Reentry Vehicles, and Lunar ATVs. However, the Solar Sail challenge alone was originally envisioned to be 2 prizes for 2 goals totaling $5 million (not much for an actual space demonstration), so the challenges might be rolled out ... very ... slowly ...