President Obama visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Apr. 15 to explain his plans for the future of American space exploration. Despite criticism from heavyweights like Neil Armstrong, the president stands behind his new goal. Rather than sending astronauts to the moon, they will go to an asteroid, and then to Mars.

To top it all of, Obama optimistically adds, “I expect to be around to see it.”

By 2525, the president says that a new spacecraft will be ready for travel that can go beyond the moon. The United States will start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history.

“By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow,” he said.

Under the Obama space plan, federal spending will bring more private companies into space exploration after NASA’s shuttle fleet retires in September. The companies will receive almost $6 billion to build their own spacecrafts. Obama says that his plan will not boost the rate of job losses to space program workers, as some critics are claiming.

“We’ll modernize the Kennedy Space Center, creating jobs as we upgrade launch facilities. And there is potential for even more job creation as companies in Florida and across America compete to be part of a new space transportation industry.”

Obama goes on to say that this could generate more than 10,000 jobs nationwide over the next few years. He also mentions that his plan would add more than 2,500 jobs to the Cape Canaveral area over the next two years than the plan by the Bush administration, which was to send astronauts back to the moon.

“We’ve been there before,” Obama said. “There’s a lot more of space to explore.”

The Discovery Space Shuttle launched last week to complete one of the final missions for NASA’s shuttle program. In a pre-dawn liftoff on Apr. 5, seven astronauts departed from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Two days later, they arrived at the International Space Station to drop off thousands of pounds of equipment, including science experiments, an extra sleeping compartment, and a darkroom to improve photography.

In a photo provided by NASA, a time-elapsed photo made in Cape Canaveral, Fla., captures space shuttle Discovery's path to orbit during liftoff from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida was at 6:21 a.m. EDT April 5, 2010 on the STS-131 mission. (AP Photo/NASA/Ben Cooper)

The launch happened with only a few minor problems. Pieces of insulating foam flew off the fuel tank, and the main antenna failed after takeoff, but NASA officials said that there were other tools to work around the situation.

Otherwise, the launch was both visually stimulating and record breaking. 15 minutes before liftoff, the space station passed over the launch site. It was across the Atlantic by the 5:21 a.m. launch, but the Discovery could be seen with the naked eye for the first seven minutes. Onlookers said the once-in-a-lifetime sight was like looking at massive, beautiful stars.

Equally exciting is that the shuttle carried three women, and the space station is carrying one. This sets the record for the most women in space at the same time.

The nearly two-week mission will include three spacewalks, led by Rick Mastracchio of Waterbury, CT. According to the Republican American, Mastracchio and the other mission specialists will spend about a total of 20 hours space walking. This is all while being tethered to the space station, which flies through space at close to 18,000 miles per hour.

“I’ve gotten the opportunity to do just about everything I wanted to do in space. I’ve been very lucky,” Mastracchio told the Republican American. After traveling through 10.2 million miles of space throughout his career, this trip will be his last.

Just three shuttle missions remain for the United States. NASA is hoping to retire its fleet by the end of September, and no one is sure what will follow for American human spaceflight.

President Obama will visit the Kennedy Space Center on Apr. 15 to host a space conference.

A press release from the White House said that the conference will discuss the new course that the administration is charting for NASA, and “focus on the goals and strategies in this new vision, the next steps, and the new technologies, new jobs, and new industries it will create.”

The International Space Station will operate into 2020 on the Obama plan. When the NASA shuttles retire, the station will rely on help from other countries. The progress and activity of the Discovery Space Shuttle can be followed on NASA’s website.

NASA is turning over moon travel to the private sector and will turn the transport of astronauts over to private companies. NASA introduced five such companies who have grants to work on transporting humans into orbit, including Boeing and Paragon Space Development on Feb. 2. NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden made the presentation of the companies, which are receiving 50 million dollars in grants to study spacecraft and other technology that would allow the private sector to take over the job that NASA has done for decades.

NASA is turning over moon travel to the private sector and will turn the transport of astronauts over to private companies.

“This is the right time; this is the right direction for the agency to take in this new era,” David Thompson, chief executive of Orbital Science Corporation, told reporters Tuesday Feb. 2 as the companies’ proposals were unveiled.

Bolden defended the Obama administration’s move to cancel the existing program that was underway to return humans to the moon and instead turn the transport of astronauts into low-Earth orbit over to private companies. He called it, “not a new idea, but rather an idea whose time has come.” He stressed that private aerospace companies have long been involved in building crew launch vehicles. NASA is already shifting some of its cargo delivery to the International Space Station to the commercial sector. Likewise, satellites have long been launched on commercial rockets.

On Monday, Feb. 1 the administration proposed abandoning the Constellation program for next generation spacecraft and rockets designed to replace the space shuttle and return humans to the moon.

Instead, President Barack Obama’s budget proposal devoted an additional 6 billion dollars over the next five years in a competition to encourage commercial aerospace operations in a kind of space taxi service.

Later Monday, NASA named the five aerospace companies to come up with concepts for transporting humans into orbit. NASA awarded a total of 50 million dollars to the companies to study human spaceflight alternatives after the retirement of the space shuttle later this year. The money comes from government stimulus funds already authorized by Congress.

Blue Origin is developing a rocket-propelled vehicle to routinely fly astronauts into space and was awarded 3.7 million dollars to develop an escape system and a crew module. The Boeing Company received 18 million dollars for its work on a transportation system including a seven-person crew capsule. Paragon Space Development Corporation was awarded 1.4 million dollars for development of a life-support air system. Sierra Nevada Corporation received 20 million dollars for work on its Dream Chaser seven-person spacecraft, and United Launch Alliance received 6.7 million dollars for an emergency detection system for Atlas V and Delta IV rockets.

LOS ANGELES – The lunar dud for space enthusiasts has become a watershed event for NASA.

Spacecraft that crashed into the moon last month kicked up a relatively small plume. But scientists have confirmed the debris contained water — 25 gallons of it — making lunar exploration exciting again.

Experts have long suspected there was water on the moon. So the thrilling discovery announced Friday sent a ripple of hope for a future astronaut outpost in a place that has always seemed barren and inhospitable.

“We found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, lead scientist for the mission, told reporters as he held up a white water bucket for emphasis.

He said the 25 gallons of water the lunar crash kicked up was only what scientists could see from the plumes of the impact.

Some space policy experts say that makes the moon attractive for exploration again. Having an abundance of water would make it easier to set up a base camp for astronauts, supplying drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.

“Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go,” said George Washington University space policy scholar John Logsdon.

The October mission involved two strikes into a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole. First, an empty rocket hull slammed into the Cabeus crater. Then, a trailing spacecraft recorded the drama live before it also crashed into the same spot four minutes later.

Though scientists were overjoyed with the plethora of data beamed back to Earth, the mission was a public relations dud. Space enthusiasts who stayed up all night to watch the spectacle did not see the promised giant plume of debris.

NASA scientists had predicted the twin impacts would spew six miles of dust into the sunlight. Instead, images revealed only a mile-high plume, and it was not visible to many amateur astronomers peering through telescopes.

Members of the blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASA’s future plans said the discovery doesn’t change their conclusion that the program needs more money to get beyond near-Earth orbit. The panel wants NASA to look at other potential destinations like asteroids and Mars.

“This new and terrific result reassures us about lunar resources, but … the challenges currently facing the human spaceflight program remain,” Chris Chyba, a Princeton astrophysicist who is on the panel, said in an e-mail.

President George W. Bush had proposed a more than $100 billion plan to return astronauts to the moon, then go on to Mars; a test flight of an early version of a new rocket was a success last month. President Barack Obama appointed the special panel to look at the entire moon exploration program. The decision is now up to the White House, and NASA’s lunar plans are somewhat on hold until then.

As for unmanned exploration, previous missions had detected the presence of hydrogen in lunar craters near the moon’s poles, possible evidence of ice. In September, scientists reported finding tiny amounts of water in the lunar soil all over the moon’s surface.

But it was NASA’s Oct. 9 mission involving the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, that provided the stunning confirmation announced Friday — water, in the forms of ice and vapor.

“Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one,” said Greg Delory of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the mission, led by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The LCROSS spacecraft only hit one spot on the moon and it’s unclear how much water there is across the entire moon.

Scientists spent a month analyzing data from the spacecraft’s spectrometers, instruments that can detect strong signals of water molecules in the plume.

“We’ve had hints that there is water. This was almost like tasting it,” said Peter Schultz, professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the LCROSS mission.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who in 1969 made his historic Apollo 11 moonwalk with Neil Armstrong, was pleased to hear the latest discovery, but still believes the U.S. should focus on colonizing Mars.

“People will overreact to this news and say, `Let’s have a water rush to the moon,’” Aldrin said. “It doesn’t justify that.”

Mission scientists said it would take more time to tease out what else was kicked up in the moon dust.