February was a busy month for big news stories — the earthquake in Haiti, the Winter Olympics, and ongoing discussion of health care reform to name just a few — so it’s understandable that President Obama’s decision to cancel NASA’s planned return trip to the moon went largely unnoticed.

That should change in the coming months, however. Over the weekend the White House announced plans for a space conference to be held in Florida on April 15. During that conference, the president will outline what are said to be “ambitious plans” for the future of U.S. space exploration, and it appears that those plans will include, among other things, trips to Mars and beyond.

It will be interesting to see how this story unfolds. When the president first announced that he was calling off NASA’s previously-scheduled moon mission and looking instead at funding commercial space travel, there was widespread concern that his ultimate goal was to scale back space-related funding. Instead, it appears that his plans include an overall increase in funding, a more aggressive approach to developing new technologies and a long-term timetable for manned flights to the outer reaches of our solar system.

Keep an eye on this story, and as always, feel free to post your own comment or to email us if you want to weigh in!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 10:28 am and is filed under Notes from Dom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.