Mark K. Matthews

WASHINGTON — NASA made official on Wednesday its next vision for space travel by unveiling plans for a massive rocket it hopes can blast astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 while laying the foundation for a future trip to Mars.

WASHINGTON -- The rocket and capsule that NASA is proposing to return astronauts to the moon would fly just twice in the next 10 years and cost as much as $38 billion, according to internal NASA documents obtained by The Orlando Sentinel.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's human spaceflight program, once a symbol of America's technical supremacy, is flailing -- beset by many of the same forces that once unified behind the agency to put a man on the moon.

With the space shuttle set to retire this year, and no successor imminent, today's NASA is being pulled apart by burdensome congressional demands, shrinking federal budgets, greedy contractors, a hidebound bureaucracy and an ambitious new commercial space industry that wants to shake up the status quo.

"Our civil space agency has decayed from Kennedy's and Reagan's visions of opening a new frontier to the point where it's just a jobs program in a death spiral of addiction and denial, with thousands of honest innovators trapped inside like flies in bureaucratic amber," said space-policy consultant James Muncy.

Efforts to get the agency back on track are in trouble. Already, a new plan for NASA signed into law by President Barack Obama in October -- to replace the Constellation program, which spent $12 billion without producing a rocket -- appears to be unraveling.

WASHINGTON -- Thanks to congressional inaction, NASA must continue to fund its defunct Ares I rocket program until March -- a requirement that will cost the agency nearly $500 million at a time when NASA is struggling with the expensive task of replacing the space shuttle.