US president, Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida where he promised to have a "leap into the future" for the US space agency NASA.

He has cancelled the $108 billion Constellation programme under which NASA was suppose to return Humans to the Moon by 2020 and send astronauts to Mars by 2030. Under the new arrangement he has set a number of stepping stones for the agency before it reaches Mars by mid 2030's which is about 5 years behind plans.

NASA is to prepare on where it will land and on the work to be done once it lands there. NASA will first prepare for a manned mission to land on an asteroid by 2025.

"Nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space, than me. But we have got to do it in a smart way, we can't just keep doing the same old things that we've been doing and thinking that somehow that's going to get us to where we want to go," he said.

"By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth," he added. "A landing on Mars itself will follow, and I expect to be around to see it."

About $3.1 billion will be spent on new rocket technologies to prepare a blueprint by 2015. The spacecraft Orion which was supposed to be used for taking humans to the moon by 2020 will be sent to the International Space Station and used an emergency craft.

There are many critics to president's plans as they accuse it of lacking a definite timeline and also its failure to maintain human launch capabilities. Retired astronaut and other Aurospace experts express that the government needs to spend more on the space programmes to maintain the lead by the US in space explorations in face of increasing Space Race starting to heat up in Asia.