Apr 11, 2010

By Reid Wilson

Fifteen months into his first term, President Obama has succeeded in generating bipartisan cooperation in Congress. The only trouble is, he has united members from across the country and the political spectrum in opposition to his plan to cut a program to send humans to the moon and beyond.  There is virtually no support in Congress for the administration’s proposal to cancel the Constellation program, the next-generation manned space flight project that would replace the shuttles, which are set to retire shortly. Instead, under the administration’s February budget, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would return to Go in search of a new project with the goal of eventually reaching beyond low-Earth orbit.  Canceling Constellation would mean thousands of layoffs, further weakening the economy in key regions of the country where a rebound has just begun. Moreover, lawmakers say that it would amount to abandoning the nation’s historic position as the global leader in space.

The proposal has generated such anger, especially among space scientists, that Obama will travel to Florida’s Space Coast next week for a meeting with NASA employees to explain his goal. And he will bring money: The president is proposing an additional $6 billion for NASA over the next several years, including $1.9 billion for the Kennedy Space Center, according to a senior administration official who asked not to be named.  Congress, however, has the power of the purse, and persuading it to go along with the White House will be a harder sell. “I’ve been explicit with the president and the administration that I felt their plan, as outlined in the budget, was unacceptable; and that we would be working toward making changes that would do some of the things that most of the members in Congress, in a bipartisan way, would agree are essential to America’s leadership in space exploration,” said freshman Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, a Democrat whose Florida district is home to many NASA employees.

The program, the White House has said, is significantly over budget and behind schedule. What’s more, the senior administration official said, using the extra NASA money to make upgrades at Kennedy will enable the space center to increase the pace of rocket launches as the administration aims to create a commercial space industry.
“The Constellation program is on an unsustainable trajectory,” cost-wise, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told a congressional panel at a March 23 hearing. “We are going to find a way to get America to Mars, in due course”—but only after starting over.  Despite the initial negative reaction on Capitol Hill, “One of the things I think more and more members of Congress are coming to recognize is that despite the valiant efforts of NASA and its contractors, we weren’t going to get back to the moon for the seventh time,” the administration official said. “This goal of getting back to the moon was unexecutable.”

[E]stimates of the economic impact of the new budget for NASA vary widely. After Bush announced his Mars goal, a NASA document said that about 17,000 civil servants and contractor employees would be transferred from the shuttle program to the new project. Kosmas estimated that canceling Constellation would affect 20,000 employees at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA spokesman Grey Hautaluoma said that 11,500 workers are currently involved in the Constellation program. (The senior administration official said that the additional NASA funding would create about 5,000 jobs nationally.)  But the economic impact will be much broader. A 2007 NASA document said that 1,500 suppliers would be involved in the transition, including companies as varied as hardware suppliers and some of the nation’s largest aerospace corporations. In total, canceling Constellation could cost 30,000 jobs, according to some estimates.  NASA has seen this before. In 1969, just months after the Apollo program put an astronaut on the moon, the agency laid off thousands of employees involved in Apollo—including a young inspector named Bill Posey. Posey is now a freshman member of Congress representing a district on Florida’s Space Coast as a Republican.  “My wife and I, we sold our house—over half paid up—for $300 and ‘take over the payments.’ But we were lucky. Most of the houses on our street ultimately got foreclosed on. I mean, you had engineers out there literally pumping gas at a gas station. And then they packed up and left, never to return to the space program again,” Posey said, recalling the impact the layoffs had on Florida. “I know what it’s like to get laid off in the space program. This is not conceptual to me. This is reality.”

This article was reprinted from http://www.nationaljournal.com