The $250 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009 that is going to NASA exploration systems and not its commercial COTS work (which is getting $150 million) is being split in the following ways according to Exporation Systems Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Doug Cooke
- $4 million for materials to understand their failure limits
- $25 million for the Ares I mobile launch platform
- $10.2 million for SBIR work
- $165 million for Orion crew exploration vehicle, including $112 million to develop engineering development test units, incl life support and propulsion
- $49 million for accelerating the development of an Orion service module test article
Reviewing my audio recording of this answer it wasn’t at all clear and initially it seemed to be a list of separate items that added up to $365 million and that had to be wrong so after repeatedly listening to it I think it is the above split with Orion winning the lion’s share
Cooke said that the agency wanted to spend as much of this money as it could this year rather than next but the FY2009 operational plan currently with Congress would be reviewed and how those funds could be split over this year fiscal year and the next was yet to be finally decided
