By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - President Barack Obama wants NASA to start work on finding a small asteroid that could be shifted into an orbit near the moon and used by astronauts as a stepping-stone for an eventual mission to Mars, agency officials said on Wednesday.

The project, which envisions that astronauts could visit such an asteroid as early as 2021, is included in Obama's $17.7 billion spending plan for the U.S. space agency for the 2014 fiscal year.

It is intended as an expansion of existing initiatives to find asteroids that may be on a collision course with Earth, and preparations for a human expedition to Mars in the 2030s.

"This mission allows us to better develop our technology and systems to explore farther than we've ever been before - to an asteroid and to Mars - places that humanity has dreamed about but has had no hope of ever attaining," NASA administrator Charles Bolden told reporters during a conference call.

"We're on the threshold of being able to tell my kids and my grandkids that we're almost there."

In 2010, Obama proposed that NASA follow the International Space Station program with a human mission to an asteroid by 2025. The agency has been developing a heavy-lift rocket and deep-space capsule capable of carrying astronauts beyond the station's 250-mile (400-km) high orbit.

The system would be capable of traveling to the moon, asteroids and eventually to Mars, the long-term goal of the U.S. human space program.

"I think the asteroid-retrieval mission lays out a place for us to go," Kennedy Space Center director Bob Cabana told reporters in a separate conference call.

"It does everything that needs to be done as far as developing the technologies and the skills that we need for exploration beyond planet Earth."

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NASA unveils plan to catch asteroid as step to Mars flight