am. we have to do it in a smart way. reporter: to visit asteroids and eventually land on mars by 2035 or so, the president believes nasa should begin development on heavy lift rocket technologies, build an orion space capsule for the space station and support space taxis like one he looked at today. in the meantime we hitch expensive ride with russians to the space station. it has supports like buzz aldrin the second man to set foot on the moon. he felt the constellation program was too much been there, done that. i think going back to the moon and getting there 40, 50 years after we were there in the last century is not demonstrating american leadership. reporter: the first man on the moon, neil armstrong does not like the obama plan. neither does the last man to stand on the moon, gene cerna. it adds up to philosophical ideas of what we may or may not do. use the word undefined. everything in the budget is
you said that we ve got to be exceptional. should it become more private? should we incentivize on the private side? i m out free market ideas. sounds like a great idea. the tricky marketing thin. he s raising the budget of the space program while cutting the constellation program. look, the bottom line is, armstrong,ç lovell are all against it. i had pleasure of having christmas dinner at his restaurant outside chicago this is not a grandstanding guy. if he is speaking out on this, it is because he thinks has to. fact that armstrong is peeking out is what is astonishing. aldrin armstrong is almost never heard from. sean: you use the term american exceptionalism. the president dismissed that awe [ talking over each other ] there s a train in the
kennedy space center in florida. table nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before the decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. reporter: to the moon we went, as j.f.k. promised, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. now the space program that gave us mercury, apollo, gemini is at a crossroads. shuttle program is coming to a close. follow on constellation program that was supposed to take to us the moon and mars canceled. so today, at the kennedy space center, president obama stood before an audience wanting to hear a clearly stated vision for the future. what we are looking for is not continue on the same path. we want to leap into the future. we want major breakthroughs. nobody is more committed to manned space flight, human exploration of space, than i
yeah, and you know what? we ve already had a million people log on this week. bill: whoa! martha: a million? yes, a million. now, when we started this, i was really worried that everyone was going to say no to everything, because they are concerned about more government spending and higher taxes. i was wrong. yesterday, we had people ask about the president s plan to end nasa s constellation program, basically putting men back on the moon, $3.5 billion, and you know what, 75 percent of the viewers said yes, i want to keep that program. now, contrast that with the $800 billion stimulus bill which costs people a lot of money, basically, you know, from $30 or up to $100,000, depending upon your income, and voters said overwhelmingly, 93 percent, said no, we don t like that. what s the point, you guys? in my opinion, it s a tough choice to balance the budget and it s symbolic of the kind of decisions congress is making, why it is so hard and there is gridlock
includes an optimal balance between robotic missions and humans on missions. megyn: how are we going to get up there? how are we going to get up there? right now, again, be careful between making a difference between constellation being canceled and not having capacity to get up there. constellation wasn t getting us up there. it was relying constellation program also relied on russians to go up. what this program does is say, let s build better vehicles. so there is commitment to build additional heavy launch vehicles and make a decision on that 2015 after we explored new technologies, not looking over our shoeled saying glory days of nasa were back in apollo and we ll brush off a polly era technology, spruce it up and make it into something new. let s do something unique. think about different kind of vehicles better propulsion systems. megyn: got it. that is beauty of doing science and space exploration. megyn: i got to go. thanks for coming on.