Florida Today has a couple of reports about President Barack Obama’s proposed budget, which provides more than $1 billion in extra funding while seeming to maintain most of the features of the last administration’s space policy, including human voyages to the moon:
The budget blueprint, released by the White House on Thursday, appears to dash the hopes of many on Florida’s Space Coast that Obama might extend the life of the shuttle program — one of several options examined by his transition team.
But a senior administration official indicated that Obama still could change the direction given to NASA by the Bush administration when his full budget is delivered to Congress in April.
“I think that we will be talking in more detail about how we envision the plan working going forward with regard to the shuttle. You’re going to see more details on that in April,” Rob Nabors, deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told FLORIDA TODAY in a media teleconference.
“One of the things we are planning on doing is evaluating all of the assumptions underlying the previous administration’s budget, the budget that we’re inheriting. And I think at this point, we will have more to say about that in April.”
Read the full story. Meanwhile, officials in Florida are struggling to deal with the economic impact that the shuttle program’s end would bring to the region:
Though President Barack Obama’s budget is generous to NASA, thousands of jobs likely will be lost at Kennedy Space Center after 2010 — just as the nation is predicted to emerge from the present recession.
Additionally, the budget does not close the five-year gap between the end of the shuttle program and the next space vehicle, which will require an estimated 3,500 fewer workers.
“There is a jobs gap in there as well as the flight gap,” said Dale Ketcham, director of the University of Central Florida’s Spaceport Research & Technology Institute at KSC.
Good luck with all that.
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