Early in February 2010, President Obama cancelled NASA’s Constellation program challenging the space agency to do more than put a man back on the moon. Though nothing has been spoken of publicly regarding President Obama’s new game plan for NASA, the entire scheme was part and parcel of his 2011 budget request.
Major federal agencies do not take too well to huge changes, especially at NASA where such changes are only expected to take place once in every generation. President Obama’s choice to put a stop to the Constellation program has been likened to President Nixon’s decision to kill the Apollo program in the 1970s and put together a space shuttle.
While President Obama’s decision has a few spines tingling, especially those of some space visionaries, the brand new space strategy seems to focus heavily on technology development and the creation of a hot commercial sector where astronauts will be able to purchase tickets to space, just like we buy airline tickets. This kind of enthusiasm has been received with confusion and frustration by people in the industry who are wary of such changes and worry that NASA’s new direction is now ill-defined.
This sudden shift has left a large number of NASA employees uncertain about their next step at work, while thousands of NASA contractors are even more unsettled as the program they have been working on for the last five years will not be operational any more. Putting a stop to the Constellation program and terminating all existing contracts will cost the Obama budget around $2.5 billion. The program employment numbers for 2010 stood at 11,500 people in the US and around 8,600 from the private sector.