CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - President Barack Obama unveiled a sweeping new space vision for NASA and the United States Thursday, one that aims to send astronauts to a nearby asteroid and ultimately on to Mars.
By 2025, the United States is expected to begin testing spacecraft for deep space exploration, vehicles capable of exploring beyond the moon on the first-ever manned trip to an asteroid, Obama said.
"By the mid-2030s I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth," President Obama said.
Speaking to a crowd of more than 200 people here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, President Obama outlined his plan for NASA's future space exploration. That plan includes resurrecting a pared down version of the capsule-based Orion spacecraft initially slated to be scrapped under the president's cancellation of the Constellation program in February.
The new version of the Orion spacecraft would be launched unmanned to the International Space Station to serve as an escape ship for American astronauts, giving NASA more flexibility from its reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, White House officials said. [Fact sheet on Obama's space plan.]
The president also announced his commitment to building a heavy-lift rocket in 2015, one which could be geared to launching new spacecraft and payloads for ambitious expeditions to a nearby asteroid and stable points in space called Lagrange points in preparation for a manned spaceflight to Mars. Obama has proposed a $19 billion budget for NASA in 2011 and added another $6 billion over five years onto that in his announcement today.
NASA's original Constellation program aimed at retiring the space shuttle fleet in late 2010 and replacing it with Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets by 2015. But an independent review by a White House committee found the program behind schedule and underfunded to accomplish its end-goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020.
Edward Crawley, an MIT professor who served on the White House committee, said Obama's plan falls in line with one of the committee's recommendations – a flexible plan that allows for incrementally more ambitious deep space missions by astronauts using a new heavy-lift rocket.
"This is essentially...the flexible path," Crawley told reporters.
Obama unveiled his space plan at the Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center, the very same building NASA turned over to the Constellation program in 2009 to build and service Orion spacecraft. This is the first time in 12 years a sitting U.S. president has visited the Florida spaceport.
The last Commander in Chief to visit the NASA spaceport was President Bill Clinton, who appeared to watch original Mercury astronaut John Glenn rocket into space aboard the shuttle Discovery at age 77.
Unpopular plan
Obama's proposal to cancel the Constellation program and call on commercial spacecraft builders to provide the spaceships to launch astronauts into space has drawn harsh criticism from lawmakers and the public alike.
Most recently, famed Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong – the first person to walk on the moon – and other lunar explorers spoke out against the plan in an e-mail statement sent to the media. Armstrong and fellow Apollo program astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan called Obama's space vision "devastating" to the United States' spaceflight legacy.
"To be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature," the former astronauts wrote.
Other critics blasted the plan because of its initial apparent lack of destination, while supporters contend that it will free NASA to tackle more ambitious space missions by using commercial vehicles to ferry American astronauts to low-Earth orbit.
Those supporters include Buzz Aldrin, who landed on the moon with Armstrong during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission.
"I hope NASA will embrace this new direction as much as I do, and help us all continue to use space exploration to drive prosperity and innovation right here on Earth," Aldrin said in a statement. "Mars is the next frontier for humankind, and NASA will be leading the way there if we aggressively support the President's plans."
Saving space jobs
Obama's space plan, which still needs to win approval from a skeptical Congress, still includes retiring NASA's shuttle fleet, but adds some funding to allow flights between September and December 2010 if there are slight delays. It would also extend the International Space Station's operations through at least 2020.
NASA plans to fly just four more shuttle missions – one of which is under way now – before retiring the shuttle fleet later this year.
Here at the Kennedy Space Center, workers are focused on the 2,500 jobs beyond what was coming for the planned Constellation program – also promised in Obama's space plan. The center expected to lose thousands of jobs once with the shuttle is retirement in September and the cancellation of Constellation.
The space shuttle Discovery is also back in space today.
The shuttle and a crew of seven astronauts are in the midst of a two-week delivery mission to the International Space Station. Discovery is due to depart the space station on Saturday and land Monday morning.
SPACE.com -- Obama Aims to Send Astronauts to an Asteroid, Then to Mars
