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February 6th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Information Week reports the National Research Council has issued a report describing the top 16 technologies that NASA needs to work on in the next five years in order to advance the science of space exploration.
What are the technologies suggested by the NRC report?
They are, in no particular order of importance: Radiation mitigation for human spaceflight; guidance, navigation and control; optical systems; long-duration crew health; solar power generation; high-contrast imaging and spectroscopy technologies; environmental control and life support systems; electric propulsion; detectors and focal planes; instruments and sensors; fission power generation; lightweight and multifunctional materials and structures; nuclear thermal propulsion; entry, descent, and landing thermal protection systems; active thermal control of cryogenic systems; extreme terrain mobility.
How much has NASA budgeted for developing new technology?
According to Space.com, NASA is planning to allocate $500 million to $1 billion per year to develop new space technology. The National Research Council took this budget into account when developing its 16 priorities.
What is missing from the list of priority technologies?
Writing in Slate, Konstantin Kakaes suggests NASA does not need 16 priorities. NASA needs just one priority, which is lowering the cost of launching things and people into space. So long as space flight remains expensive, test flying technology demonstrators – something the NRC report advises NASA to do – will be prohibitively expensive. One reason that NASA has been adverse to failure is that with the cost of space flight being high, failure is so expensive it is — as the often quoted statement says — not an option.
NASA is attempting to address this problem through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems and the Commercial Crew programs, which seeks to lower the cost of space travel by outsourcing it to private industry, thus hopefully unleashing the power of commercial competition.
What about prize competitions?
While former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has proposed prize competitions to further space exploration goals, NASA has already undertaken prizes under the Centennial Challenges program. Some of the prizes already one include a new astronaut glove design, a lunar lander simulation, and a lunar regolith excavation demonstrator. Current prize competitions include a nano satellite launch, power beaming, and an autonomous sample return robot. The Centennial Challenges competitions generally have prize purses in the millions of dollars. Gingrich has proposed allocated 10 percent of NASA’s budget, about $1.78 billion each year. That implies prize purses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which may be enough to fund some of the NRC technology priorities as a technology prize competition.
How else is NASA proposing to facilitate technology development?
NASA is developing a program to fund low cost technology development by small businesses and even individual inventors. Proposals that seem promising could get grants of up to $100,000.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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