It appears that NASA’s goal of returning to the moon will happen in spite of recent economic downturns, budget cuts and the like. The plan? To use the existing space shuttle platform, but without the space shuttle. Check out the article here from the San Francisco Chronicle.
The basic idea is to save lots of money by reusing existing designs and launch configurations. Sounds good to me. A billion here, a billion there really adds up after a while.
j steven perry, The Blog 