NYTimes: NASA Casts a Wider Net for New Ideas

Technology reporter Noah Schachtman takes a look in a dorm room in British Columbia and finds one of the bright, obscure innovators the space agency hopes will give it a shot of fresh cleverness. He profiles a young man with a knack for space elevators and who is angling for NASA cash, and who has designs on such delightful quarry as, from the story: “A separate Regolith Oxygen competition, scheduled for 2008…for robots that can extract oxygen from the stones.” Chief tracker loves the hard edges on that riff.

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