Funding for NASA’s Centennial Challenges

Several weeks ago, I had posted a link to TopSpacer’s article at hobbyspace.com, an article discussing “funding for the Centennial Challenges program will be zeroed out for 2007” and wondering what that meant.  Then a few days ago, the Space Frontier Foundation issues a press release saying essentially the same thing that TopSpacer’s article did.  I contacted Jeff Krukin, the Executive Director of the Space Frontier Foundation, and asked him if the current games are in jeopardy.  He replied that they are not;

“The prized that have already been announced are funded with money appropriated in previous years.  Future (not yet announced) prized are dependent on new funding provided in FY2007 or later, so there is no funding for new prizes.”

Yesterday, over at Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log, he said essentially the same thing; funding for the existing prizes (including the Space Elevator challenge) is there, but funding for NEW prizes is not.

2 thoughts on “Funding for NASA’s Centennial Challenges

  1. Clark

    Sorry I wasn’t clear in the original posting. Note that I did say,

    “Regardless of this bill, the pool of money for the CC will keep the current Challenges going till 2010. However, there will be no new challenges and a couple that were almost ready to be implemented will be killed.”

    I meant by this that even if the appropriations bill in the Senate zeros out new funding, the current challenges purses are not affected (at least not until they expire in 2010 if there are no winners by then.) In a subsequent posting I reiterated this point.

    I’m optimistic that new money will be found for the CC program either by Congress going with the House appropriations amount for the funding or by NASA shifting some internal funds into it.
    – Clark

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