TBH it's difficult to take serious any campaign running through these crowdfunding platforms. My "scam alert" sirens start to go off any time I see these kind of links.
I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect the Principal Investigator was sold a bunch of baloney from the crowdsource outfit. They do take a large portion of the funding, after all. The PI had already been through Phase I and Phase II of NASA funding and likely went to crowdfunding because he lost Phase III.
https://www.nasa.gov/general/an-innovative-solution-to-nasas...