16-04-10 Obama sets out Mars mission

US President Barack Obama has announced a new direction for NASA that will involve plans to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025.Speaking yesterday at Florida's Kennedy Space Center,the launching spot for US manned spaceflights,Obama also called for a new "heavy-lift" rocket design to take astronauts on a mission to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s that will "eventually" be used to take humans to the Martian surface.In February the Obama administration announced that it was cancelling the Constellation programme – first proposed by George W Bush in 2004 – to develop new rockets that would allow astronauts to return to the Moon by 2020.Critics argued that the decision would surrender US leadership in space and extinguish the country's vision of exploration.Neil Armstrong,the first man to walk on the Moon,called the decision "devastating" and a waste of the $10bn investment in Constellation and the years of research and development put into the project.The new plan involves retaining some of the Constellation's technology and NASA will now start to adapt its Orion crew capsule as a kind of "space lifeboat" that will reduce reliance on foreign vehicles to rescue astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS).Obama also announced that NASA will now invest more than $3bn in research on an advanced heavy-lift rocket for missions to a near-Earth asteroid and Mars,with a design expected to be complete "no later" than 2015.The rocket,which should be complete a few years after,could be used for a trip to a near-Earth asteroid and then in a separate mission to Mars.