NASA strategy met with outrage
“It’s bad for the country,” Schmitt says. “This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism.”
Schmitt’s harsh words are part of a furious blowback to the administration’s new strategy for NASA. The administration has decided to kill NASA’s Constellation program, crafted during the Bush administration with an ambitious goal of putting astronauts back on the moon by 2020. Instead, Obama’s 2011 budget request would nix Constellation’s rocket and crew capsule, funnel billions to new space flight technologies, and outsource to commercial firms the task of ferrying astronauts to low-earth orbit.
The new strategy, however, has been met with howls of outrage from many in the aerospace community. The entire congressional delegation from Florida, Democrats and Republicans alike, has sent a letter of protest to the president. Doubters fill op-ed pages and space blogs.
The administration apparently senses that it is losing the public relations battle. On Sunday the White House announced that the president, who has said almost nothing in public about his NASA strategy, will headline a conference on NASA policy April 15 in Central Florida. The format and location have yet to be announced.
Obama will be heading into what has become hostile territory.
“They made a mistake when they rolled out their space program, because they gave the perception that they had killed the manned space program,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who disagrees with that perception but wants the Obama plan modified. Nelson says that the president should declare during the Florida conference that NASA’s goal is sending humans to Mars — echoing President John F. Kennedy’s famous speech vowing that the United States would put a man on the moon.
Nelson noted that the Interstate 4 corridor through Central Florida is politically critical in national elections. The debate over space policy is hardly esoteric for voters in districts loaded with high-skilled aerospace jobs.
“I think it has a lot of repercussions for the president. If a national candidate does not carry the I-4 corridor, they don’t win Florida,” Nelson said.
Congress still must approve NASA’s strategic change. Lawmakers in Florida, Alabama and Texas, states rich in space jobs, have sharply criticized the Obama plan as a job-killer. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) says that under Obama’s strategy “America’s decades-long dominance of space will finally come to an end.”
In fact, Obama’s budget boosts NASA’s funding by $6 billion over the next five years. The extra money is less than the $3 billion-a-year hike that a presidential advisory panel said would be necessary for a robust human space flight, but it’s still an increase when many agencies are being squeezed.
Change doesn’t come easily in the aerospace industry, with its long timelines and abundance of customized technology. Thousands of aerospace contract workers were already going to lose their jobs with the retirement of the aging fleet of space shuttles. Constellation, conceived after the space shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, was designed with architecture that would let some shuttle jobs migrate to the new program. NASA has already poured $9 billion into the development of a new rocket, Ares 1, and a new spacecraft, Orion. Terminating the program and closing out contracts will cost $2.5 billion more, the administration estimates.