The Obama administration has cleared NASA's initiative to launch a manned spacecraft to the far side of the moon and establish an outpost that would allow for the agency's astronauts to land on an asteroid by 2025, and Mars by the mid-2030's.
George Washington University's John Logsdon states, "They've been holding off announcing that until after the election" due to potential budget changes in the event that Romney took the White House.
NASA's deputy chief Lori Garver notes that the agency submitted plans for the mission to Congress back and September.
"We're going back to the moon, attempting the first-ever mission to send humans to an asteroid and actively developing a plan to take Americans to Mars," she said.
A rocket known as the Space Launch System (SLS) and a crew capsule entitled Orion are being developed for the mission, reports Space.com.
NASA hopes to land their vehicles at Earth-moon L2, where "the two bodies' gravitational pulls roughly balance out," according to the site.
Logsdon explains that "NASA has been evolving its thinking, and its latest charts have inserted a new element of cislunar/lunar gateway/Earth-moon L2 sort of stuff into the plan."
He adds, "They're not talking about plan that might imply significant budget increases. It gives a more focused use for SLS and Orion before an asteroid mission." The agency's current budget is $17.7 billion.
"I'm not privy to the specifics of this, but one could conceive of the second SLS mission being the start of activity in cislunar space, rather than just being a lunar orbit mission."
SLS and Orion are set to launch in 2021.
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