During the Farnborough International Airshow this month, Israel Aerospace Industries CEO and President Joseph Weiss talked with Paris Bureau Chief Amy Svitak, about plans to expand the company’s presence in the global space sector with exports of remote-sensing and communications satellites.
The surface of Mars is the most ambitious target for human explorers in the foreseeable future, given the state of technology, funding and political will today, according to a U.S. National Research Council study team that examined the issue over the past year and a half.
For the first several decades of human space activity, the economically and militarily valuable region of near-Earth orbit seemed like an infinite resource.
N o doubt there was a lot of eye-rolling at NASA headquarters back in May when the Government Accountability Office faulted the agency for its lack of rigor in estimating life-cycle costs for the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS). Certainly no one there who wants to see the big booster built is eager to draw attention to its price tag. But no one knows the costs of SLS or any of the other hardware NASA needs to fulfill its mandate to explore space.
