Obama to unveil astronauts’ mission to Mars

WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama will on Thursday unveil a “bold and daring” new space mission to send astronauts to Mars, months after he scrapped a project to return to the Moon.

The president promised that the program would pursue trips to “a sequence of deep-space destinations”, buoyed by a NASA budget that will be increased by six million dollars over the next five years, reports The Telegraph.

It is hoped that by 2015, NASA will be in a position to determine “the specific heavy-lift rocket” needed to send astronauts to asteroids, the moons of Mars and eventually to Mars itself, the paper quoting from a proposal published on the White House website, said.

It also allocates three billion dollars more to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, a 60 per cent increase over previous plans. (ANI)