Obama insists new plan will spur deep space exploration

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--President Barack Obama flew to the Kennedy Space Center Thursday to sell his new space policy, a radical change of course for NASA that would cancel the Constellation moon program and shift manned launches to private industry while NASA studies options for future deep space exploration.
For the first time, the president laid out a rough timeline for expeditions beyond low-Earth orbit and even the moon, calling for manned missions to nearby asteroids by the mid-2020s, flights to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s, and manned landings shortly after.
"The bottom line is, nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space, than I am," he said. "But we've got to do it in a smart way and we can't just keep on doing the same old things we've been doing and thinking that somehow that's going to get us where we want to go."

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