NASA to spend $175M on new space technologies
NASA believes new spending will allow the human race to send new spacecraft and humans deeper into space.
NASA’s space shuttle program may have ended, but the agency's dreams are only getting bigger: It plans to invest $175 million in new space technologies that would better equip the human race for deeper space exploration, reports InformationWeek.
One technology being built is an optical communication system that uses a light transmitter to encode a message into an optical signal and carry it to its destination where it is then reproduced and received.
Many of the technologies will eventually be shown at NASA’s Technology Demonstration Missions, and officials believe that spending on technologies that don’t yet exist “can lower the cost of future government and commercial space activities,” writes Elizabeth Montalbano in InformationWeek.