John Shannon, manager of NASA’s space shuttle program, is proposing a next-generation rocket program that he says might cost only 20% of the estimated $35 billion price of the Constellation program. Shannon and his team say it would cost about $6.6 billion to attach a new crew capsule to the external fuel tank and solid-fuel rocket boosters currently used by the shuttle. Shannon says his superiors at NASA, worried that they might lose funding for Constellation, encouraged his design efforts. “What I was doing was not a break from NASA,” he told the AP. “I don’t care what launcher we use, I just want to go to the moon.”

Source: AIA