From NPR's Morning Edition – NASA’s administrator is defending the president’s proposed budget for NASA, which cancels the space agency’s planned space shuttle successor and instead relies on private companies to taxi crews into orbit. Charles Bolden said executives from seven companies working on commercial crew vehicles are “the faces of a new frontier.”

By turning to private companies to get astronauts to the nearby space station, Bolden said, NASA would be free to focus on “the greatest challenges that lie ahead.” It could emphasize new technology development to get astronauts out farther into space, eventually to the moon or other destinations like near-Earth asteroids.