Massively^™

For one brief, shining moment, it was filled with promise. Now, regardless of all the other things it would need to have gotten right, the speculative NASA MMO will also have to learn to fly on its own. In a news post at Gamasutra, it's been related that the Learning Technologies group has, for some reason, either rethought or lost its 3-year/$3,000,000 budget to develop its educational MMO. Instead, they'll be asking any interested developers not only to design and build the thing, but to host it as well.

In return, " ... NASA will consider negotiating brand placement, limited exclusivity and other opportunities." Well, gosh, that's awfully big of you. So in other words, some shop will create and maintain an MMO all on its own, with all the associated costs, and if they're lucky, NASA will think about letting them try to make their money back somehow. Tempting, to be sure. It's unknown at this time how many proposals they've received, but it's little things like this that make it plainly clear to us that NASA's head is mostly filled with space.