"This is a huge leap in camera technology for spaceflight," Rodney Grubbs, project manger for NASA's Imagery Experts Program, said in a written statement.
Amateur research societies have been founded in many scientific disciplines (e.g. electronics, information technology, astronomy, spaceflight, agriculture).
The goal of this mission is to develop small spacecraft technologies with game-changing potential and validate these technologies via spaceflight.
Giant among imaginative promoters of the ideas of interplanetary travel, the colonising by man of nearby planets and the urgent need for peaceful exploration of outer space, Sir Arthur C Clarke, who has died aged 90, was pre-eminent because of his hard and accurate predictions of the detailed technologies of spaceflight and of the use of near-earth space for global communications.
The House bill, the writers said, would leave "substantially underfunded" the areas of technology development, commercial spaceflight, robotic missions, and university and student research.
Further ahead, mankind will have a place and a purpose in space, but until technology improves, manned spaceflight will be an expensive luxury.
China's 13-day Shenzhou 9 mission will dock twice at the Tiangong 1 space lab, first in an automatic mode and then again in a manual mode, to demonstrate spaceflight rendezvous technology.
The Senate Launch System will force the U.S. to jettison an entire generation of expertise in spaceflight, advanced technology and exploration systems, not to mention most of our astronaut corps and the Johnson and Kennedy space centers where such work is based.
Those laws, however, haven't stifled China's progress in developing key technologies required for human spaceflight including human-rated launch and landing capabilities, extravehicular activities (EVA's) and on orbit docking maneuvers.
Science chief Grunsfeld would get money from the human spaceflight and space technology directorates to help pay for it.
