Dear CK: here is the complete text, which seems to me to mean that the ground based guys can win before the race even starts. I did have a slight misquote in my original post, "at" substitured for "to".

While space agencies spend hundreds of millions of dollars
developing a host of space-based missions to discover
distant terrestrial planets, researchers are making ingenious
use of existing technology back here on Earth. They're
confident that expensive space missions will be pipped to the post
before they even get off the ground.

from New Scientist, Jan 19, 2002