A campaign to ensure funds for NASA's Centennial Challenges are included in the agency's fiscal year 2007 budget has begun after the US Senate cancelled funding in its appropriations bill for the space agency.
The Centennial Challenges are prize contests to stimulate innovation in space elevators, reusable rocket engines, spacesuit glove development, lunar regolith excavation and oxygen extraction, and personal air vehicles.
The challenges were set up in 2005 with $10 million. Each competition is in partnership with an external organisation and NASA has prize money on offer totalling $2.4 million.
None of the money has yet been won because no team has achieved the goals set, and NASA has not spent any of the $10 million.
The House of Representatives voted to support the programme in FY2007, and differences between the bills are being settled in conference.
"We call on the appropriations conferees to support full funding for the Centennial Challenge programme in 2007," says George Whitesides, executive director of the National Space Society.
The pro-space advocacy group, the Space Frontier Foundation, X Prize Foundation and Space Exploration Alliance have formed the campaign to save the challenges.
Source: Flight International