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Space.com has been told that NASA is likely to reveal a set of ambitious goals now that Obama has been re-elected.
Assuming that the rumored plans are indeed true, the next twenty to thirty years of space exploration might play out like a real-life Carl Sagan fantasy. Items on the rumored docket include: more manned missions to the moon, a manned outpost on the far side of the moon, a mission sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and the commencement of manned missions to Mars by the mid-2030s.
In 2010, President Obama directed NASA to work toward sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s. To reach such deep-space destinations, the agency is developing a huge rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) and a crew capsule named Orion.
NASA officials think they can pull off such manned missions without busting their budget, which stands at $17.7 billion in the proposed 2013 federal budget.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slat...end_men_to_the_moon_an_asteroid_and_mars.html