NASA estimated Monday it will cost $104 billion to return astronauts to the moon by 2018 in a new rocket that combines the space shuttle with the capsule of an earlier NASA era. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, in unveiling the new lunar exploration plan announced by President Bush last year, said he is not seeking extra money and stressed that the space agency will live within its future budgets to achieve this goal. He dismissed suggestions that reconstruction of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina might derail the program first outlined by President Bush in 2004.
