The space capsule, called Orion, still will not go to the moon. It will go unmanned to the International Space Station to stand by as an emergency vehicle to return astronauts home, officials said.
Administration officials also said NASA will speed up development of a massive rocket. It would have the power to blast crew and cargo far from Earth, although no destination has been chosen yet. The rocket would be ready to launch several years earlier than under the old moon plan.
The two moves are being announced before a Thursday visit by Obama to Cape Canaveral, Florida. They are designed to counter criticism of the Obama administration's space plans as being low on detail, physical hardware, and local jobs.
The president killed President George W. Bush's moon mission, called Constellation, as being unsustainable. In a major shift, the Obama space plan relies on private companies to fly to the space station. It also extends the space station's life by five years and puts billions into research eventually to develop new government rocket ships for future missions to a nearby asteroid, the moon, Martian moons or other points in space. Those stops would be stepping stones on an eventual mission to Mars.
First man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong, veteran Apollo astronauts and former senior NASA managers have been attacking the unrevised Obama plan as the death knell for US leadership in space. Armstrong said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he had “substantial reservations” and more than two dozen Apollo era veterans signed a letter calling the plan a “misguided proposal that forces NASA out of human space operations for the foreseeable future.” Even with the revival of the Orion crew capsule, the overall moon return mission initiated by Bush, which involved establishment of a base camp, remains dead. The revived Orion, slimmed-down from earlier versions, will not be used as originally intended, to land on the moon.
The capsule will be developed and launched, unmanned, on an existing rocket to the space station, said a senior NASA official who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to detract from the presidential announcement. The Orion would remain at the space station and be used as an emergency escape ship back to Earth. That would mean NASA would not have to rely on the Russian Soyuz capsule to return astronauts to Earth.
Launching Orion on unmanned existing rockets - such as Atlas or Delta - would save money and time.
The Obama plan also will speed up development of a larger “heavy-lift” rocket that would take cargo and crew away from Earth orbit to the moon, asteroids and other places.
Originally, Obama was proposing just spending billions of dollars on various research programs to eventually develop breakthroughs to make such trips cheaper and faster.
Critics said that plan was too vague.
Now, the president is committed to choosing a single heavy-lift rocket design by 2015 and then starting its construction, officials said.
This shift by Obama means NASA would launch a heavy rocket years before it was supposed to under the old Constellation plan, the NASA official said. However, it will be different from the Apollo-like Ares V rocket that the Constellation plan would have used. Instead it will incorporate newer concepts such as refueling in orbit or using inflatable habitats, officials said.
“We wanted to take the best of what was available from Constellation,” the NASA official told The Associated Press as part of a White House briefing.
