According to Gizmag, NASA will pay as much as $US4.5 million to have 590kg of research equipment housed abord the suborbital craft, and would allow NASA to run 600 experiments per flight. When this partnership will begin exactly is unknown. But it will be the first partnership of the NASA’s Flight Opportunity program, which is built around using private aerospace firms to help conduct research. [Gizmag]
Eckythump
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 10:21 AMIt may be cheaper to do it this way than to do it with it’s own shuttle replacement, but NASA really needs a spaceship of it’s own to stay relevant!
William
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 2:04 PMNot really. NASA is in a transformative state, moving from providing space access to providing aerospace/lifescience’s research and space-exploration.
There transformation right now might not appear relevant but will put them in a good postion in the next 10-15 years to take advantage of private space access and more efficiently invest their budget in reasearch and exploration efforts