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)