Find hope in this, NASA, science and Mars fans: President Obama’s new stance on NASA’s funding will likely pump no less than $6 billion into the agency to create a new heavy rocket sooner than we’d hoped. Mars is its target.

Over the previous few weeks we’ve heard rumors about what NASA’s future might look like. All of them seemed attractive compared to the grim reality we’d assumed would happen: The Space Shuttle grounded, the Constellation moonshot program canceled, big delays in getting private space ventures ready to fire humans into space, and huge job losses in NASA and its supporting industries.

Now there’s word that during a big space event tomorrow, Obama will unveil a new vision that includes $6 billion of extra cash for the space agency, on top of its original budget plans, phased over five years. This money has very specific purposes: Firstly it’s going to create 2,500 additional jobs in and around NASA’s Florida installations, and secondly it’ll result in a new large rocket that’ll be key in taking humans to Mars. Spin-off work will include continuing to develop the Orion manned space capsule to act as an emergency escape vehicle for the international space station.

Reuters quotes White House officials on the matter, so we can assume this is an “official” leak, and the positive PR spin is unmistakable: “This new strategy means more money for NASA, more jobs for the country, more astronaut time in space” is one fabulous line, and, “This is a rocket that is going to happen two years earlier than would’ve happened under the past program” is the other. It looks like the President’s office really wants the public to buy in to this new strategy–and with good reason, as it’s got that shiny public relations gleam that all exciting space research has, as well as banging the U.S.A drum a little too.

But what exactly will $6 billion buy us in 2010 and the next several years? The emphasis seems to be on “new” rocket research, distanced from Constellation’s Ares I and V vehicles, and that implies a different approach. Ares V, the heavy-lift component of Constellation, was based on sparingly few Space Shuttle tech derivatives, and was an expensive and long-term project, needing research into new engines and other rocket systems. So maybe those rumors we heard last week of the Space Shuttle C derivative rocket are being given a boost by this news: It has the potential to be cheaper than Ares V, uses much more of the Shuttle tech that’s already familiar, and since the design has been knocking around since the 1970’s, it has the potential to arrive in service a little sooner than Ares V would’ve blasted into the skies. And its capacity to hoist heavy pieces of a space-borne vehicle, destined for Mars, is perfectly aligned with Obama’s plan for NASA’s future.