The United States has no immediate plans to send astronauts back to the Moon, according to NASA administrator Charles Bolden.

"I don't know how to say it any more plainly. NASA does not have a human lunar mission in its portfolio and we are not planning for one," Bolden said late last week at a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) in Washington, according to Space Politics.

Bolden was responding to a suggestion by UCLA chancellor emeritus and professor Al Carnesale, who leads a group formulating NASA's strategic direction, that the space agency delay a proposed crewed mission to visit an asteroid by 2025 and instead consider returning to the Moon.

"There's a great deal of enthusiasm, almost everywhere, for the Moon. I think there might be, if no one has to swallow their pride and swallow their words, and you can change the asteroid mission a little bit ... it might be possible to move towards something that might be more of a consensus," Carnesale was quoted as saying by Space Politics.

Nearly three years ago, President Barack Obama announced the country's goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid during a speech at the Kennedy Space Center. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, present at the Kennedy Space Center speech, "has been [to the Moon] ... There's a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do," Obama said at the time.

Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, with Michael Collins piloting the lunar command module, became the first humans to set foot on the Moon on July 21, 1969. Apollo 17 crew members Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans were the last in the program to visit Earth's satellite, with Cernan and Schmitt spending four days on the lunar surface in December 1972.

Last May, it was reported that NASA had begun training astronauts for an asteroid mission. In recent years, the space agency has also been focused on planning a manned trip to Mars. One part of those ambitious projects could involve constructing a space station in fixed lunar orbit, which could serve as a launching pad for manned interplanetary missions.

But some in the space community are apparently unhappy with those ambitious plans, according to Carnesale.

"The more we learn about it, the more we hear about it, people seem less enthusiastic about it," he was quoted as saying at last Thursday's meeting in Washington.

Bolden, however, stressed that changing NASA's agreed-upon, long-term objectives would be counter-productive.

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NASA: Forget the Moon, Let's Play Asteroids