Boeing is developing a simple, low cost habitat that NASA says is affordable early on, allowing various technologies to be tested over time, and that is capable of evolving into a long-duration crew support system for cislunar and Mars exploration.

An omnibus spending bill passed by Congress this month directs NASA to accelerate work on a habitation module that could be used for future deep space missions, although how NASA will implement that direction is unclear.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...