NASA's Value Plan NASA may be moving toward smaller and cheaper space exploration projects after the failure of costly spacecraft in recent years, but there's one program that has been small and cheap for decades.
He has served as a consultant to private space exploration projects, including Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and he is a co-founder of World View Enterprises, which has raised $42 million to provide an accessible, affordable way to access nearspace with high-altitude balloons.
He has contributed to a number of robotic space exploration projects and, for three years, served on the NASA Advisory Council.
However, it is probably known more for its management of the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the space exploration projects there.
In addition to Hawthorne serving as mission control for SpaceX, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby Pasadena is in charge of the expansive unmanned deep space exploration projects underway, such as the current Mars Rover missions Opportunity, still operating since landing in early 2004, and Curiosity.
In 2010, he testified before Congress to object to proposed cuts in manned space-exploration projects.
"This is the frontier of space exploration," said Hal Weaver, project scientist on New Horizons at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
Upcoming European and national space exploration programs and projects require new capabilities and scientific-technological solutions, and therefore external contributions to innovation.
Kipp Teague, who in 1999 created the Project Apollo archive, a large repository of images from missions during the zenith of US space exploration, oversaw the Flickr project.
They're taking on all kinds of grandiose projects – space exploration, building underground cities in the Antarctic, and other nonsense.
