U.S. President Barack Obama's much anticipated NASA speech April 15 clearly was designed to quell the firestorm that greeted his 2011 budget request, which proposes to scuttle Constellation, the collection of hardware development programs intended to replace the space shuttle and return astronauts to the Moon, in favor of commercializing crew transport to low Earth orbit and taking a technology-first approach to deep space exploration. Speaking at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to an invitation-only crowd that included industry executives, NASA officials, lawmakers and others, the president stressed his commitment to human spaceflight and outlined - in very broad terms - his vision for exploration featuring a crewed mission to an asteroid around 2025.
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