U.S. President Barrack Obama is dramatically revamping America's space program, killing NASA's $100 billion plans to return man to the moon and using much of that money for new rocket research. The moon plan, which NASA had already spent $9.1 billion on, was based on old technology and revisiting places astronauts had already been, officials said. The previous NASA chief, in selling the old moon plan, had even called it "Apollo on steroids." "Simply put, we're putting the science back into the rocket science at NASA," White House science adviser John Holdren said at a budget briefing Monday. The $4 billion that NASA spends yearly on human space exploration will now be used for what NASA and White House officials called dramatic changes in rocketry, including in-orbit fueling. They said eventually those new technologies would be used to send astronauts to a nearby asteroid, a brief foray back to the moon, or to the Martian moons.
