Hasta La Gadget!

President Barack Obama on Thursday laid out a case for saving some NASA jobs and an eventual manned mission to Mars.

At the Kennedy Space Center, Obama sought to address concerns–not to mention a few prominent critics like Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon–that the U.S. intends to remain a world leader with its space program, despite an original plan to abandon the Constellation moon program, Reuters reports.

“The bottom line is, nobody is more committed to manned space flight, to human exploration of space, than I am. But we’ve got to do it in a smart way,” Obama said in the article.

Obama said that he would like to see deep space-capable craft by 2025, a manned mission to an asteroid and even to Mars by the mid-2030s, and later, a mission to land humans on Mars. “And I expect to be around to see it,” he said.

He also said that he would salvage the Orion crew capsule from the Constellation program, and use that as an emergency escape vehicle for the International Space Station–preventing the need to rely on Russia’s Soyuz capsule.

Obama also proposed a $40 million fund to boost the economy around NASA’s facilities in Florida, which could create thousands of new jobs to offset the losses at NASA–projected to be about 9,000 Kennedy Space Center jobs after the shuttle program ends and Constellation is shut down, according to the report. (Image: NASA/Ares I)

NASA has finally revealed its plans for the coming years Thursday, announcing a lineup of new programs that fulfill President Obama’s plan for space exploration.

In lieu of the Constellation program, which has now been terminated, NASA plans to develop commercial flights of crew and cargo to the International Space Station, along with long-range technology to allow sustained exploration beyond Earth’s orbit, including by humans, according to the New York Times.

One example is $6 billion (over five years) for Flagship Technology Demonstrations, which will develop orbital fuel depots and test the idea of using planetary atmospheres to slow spacecraft instead of braking rockets, the report said.

The Kennedy Space center, meanwhile, will get $5.8 billion over five years to develop commercial cargo and astronaut passenger programs for the space station.

NASA is attempting to fix a power glitch it discovered in the nuclear power plant of the $2.3 billion Mars Science Laboratory, the next rover scheduled to explore Mars, Space.com reports.

NASA plans to launch Curiosity in 2011; the rover received a new name after the agency held a nationwide student contest last year. But just recently, the agency found a “slightly faster than expected degradation rate” in the rover’s radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which will boost the craft’s range and overall lifetime on the red planet.

The generator uses 10 pounds of plutonium dioxide, mostly plutonium-238, as a heat source, the report said. A NASA engineer said that the agency is currently working with the Department of Energy to understand the problem. So far, the only expected impact (if left unfixed) is that the rover will need a few extra operational workarounds during the Martian winter.

We’ve seen examples before of the iPhone acting as a remote control for something–but EclipseCon 2010 attendees have gone a step further.

Conference attendees were challenged to create a robotic control system to drive a NASA-built robot across a prototype Mars landscape. As Slashdot reports, developers had to either prove their e4 programming skills by creating an e4-Rover client, or use an existing e4 client to operate the rover through a series of tasks to collect points.

The winning entry was designed by Peter Friese and Heiko Behrens, who together coded up an iPhone client that controls the robot using the iPhone’s accelerometer. Watch the video after the break for a short demonstration.