Obama Will Visit Florida to Discuss Space Plans

According to an announcement the White House made on Match 7, US President Barack Obama will be making a visit to Florida on April 15 to discuss the impact that his Administration's space plans will have on the community here. Florida stands to lose most if the shuttles are retired, with hundreds of the best-qualified rocket scientists on the planet standing to lose their jobs. Obama's 2011 budget proposal has been met with tremendous opposition in Congress, and so the President needs to do everything within his power to make more friends, among the people his decisions target directly.

“Specifically, the conference will focus on the goals and strategies in this new vision, the next steps, and the new technologies, new jobs, and new industries it will create,” the White House announced in a press release. Obama, alongside “top officials and other space leaders,” will discuss the opportunities ahead, and will also attempt to detail to the work force in places such as the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) how jobs will be saved. One of the main critiques that the new plan has received is that it does not provide sufficient detail on how the Administration plans to keep the highly-trained workforce within NASA, and from flocking to the private sector.

The goal of the White House is to “invest in the development of a targeted set of inter-related technologies and capabilities that can help us travel from the Earth's cradle to our nearby Solar System neighborhood in a more effective and affordable way, thus laying the foundation to support journeys to the Moon, asteroids, and eventually to Mars,” the same document said. While Obama will be visiting Florida, the NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is scheduled to speak (also on April 15), at a popular conference to be held in Colorado Springs. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver was scheduled to hold the speech, but the President's visit changed the initial plans, Space reports.

The KSC, alongside the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas, are the facilities that stand to lose most from the new approach to space exploration. Representatives from these three states, Republican and Democrats alike, are putting up a serious fight against the new budget proposal. They argue that the decision threatens national security, and that sacking Project Constellation would cause America to lose its dominant position in the space industry. They argue that grounding the shuttles without a replacement in sight would make the country dependent on Russian and Chinese technology. These two nations are investing heavily in new crafts.