http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/science/president-obama-nasa-mars.html 2016-10-11 19:48:07 Obama Gives New Details About Sending People to Mars President Obama and NASA officials described the country’s plans for space exploration, including a partnership with private companies to develop human space habitats. === President Obama The statement came in In 2010, Mr. Obama His column on Tuesday, along with a “If we make our leadership in space even stronger in this century than it was in the last,” Mr. Obama wrote, “we won’t just benefit from related advances in energy, medicine, agriculture and artificial intelligence, we’ll benefit from a better understanding of our environment and ourselves.” In the blog post, John Holdren, a senior White House adviser, and Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator, said that seven companies had received awards to develop habitats that could eventually sustain astronauts on deep space missions to destinations like Mars. NASA will also allow private companies to add their own modules to the space station, they said. In the next decade, they said, work aboard the International Space Station will move to a new stage that will “demonstrate and test technologies for the first time in cis-lunar space, the area around the moon, where our astronauts are days or weeks away from Earth, rather than hours.” The post continued, “This work serves as necessary preparation for eventual missions that will take humanity even further, to Mars and beyond.” Plenty of challenges remain Elon Musk