but later announced changes to the proposal in a major space policy speech at Kennedy Space Center on April 15, 2010. In October 2010, the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 was signed into law, which canceled Constellation. However, previous legislation kept Constellation contracts in force until a new funding bill was passed for 2011. Due to previous legislative obligations, $500 million was to be paid to contractors after the program's cancellation until March 2011. Successor The successor to the Ares rocket family is the Space Launch System, a more versatile vehicle designed to launch both crew and cargo, similar to the Ares IV concept. It has a payload range of 95-130 tons to LEO across its different variants. The SLS is similar to earlier Ares V designs in that it uses a stretched 8.4–meter external tank and is powered by 4 RS-25s. Initial designs for the SLS used the same Earth Departure Stage but development was put on hold with the 4-RL-10 Exploration Upper Stage taking its place. Both vehicles make use of the same 5–segment SRBs, although the SLS will not recover them. Under the Artemis program, the vehicle will transport crew to the Moon in the Orion spacecraft as well as logistics equipment and cargo for surface missions. They will rendezvous with a separate lunar lander either docked to the Lunar Gateway, a lunar orbital station, or free flying in lunar orbit. The SLS Block 1B version is capable of Earth orbital rendezvous lunar mission profiles such as that of the Ares V, lunar orbital rendezvous such as what NASA is currently pursuing, and integrated lunar missions such as the Apollo missions using the Saturn V, which has been proposed under a new House of Representatives bill. Design The Ares V was intended as a heavy launch vehicle to send large hardware and materials to the Moon, or to send supplies beyond Earth orbit to sustain human presence there. The Ares V was designed to be a three-stage rocket: the first and second stages, which burn together, were to use both solid and liquid propulsion with the upper stage providing the necessary propulsion to send the hardware and staples beyond low Earth orbit and onto a trajectory to the Moon. Ares V underwent a preliminary design review after the results of the 2009 Augustine Commission. Like the Space Shuttle, the Ares vehicle was to use a pair of