“As a central organizing principle of our work, and despite the fact that 80% of our total funding goes to industry and will continue to do so, I firmly believe that it must be NASA and its engineering staff, and not our contractors, who will assume the primary responsibility for making this program work. We are undertaking a multi-generational program of sustained exploration, and we must ask where our intellectual capital should reside. Should it be outside the government in the hands of a prime contractor whose interests may change over the years?”
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing