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New White House task force on NASA to focus on job loss
President Barack Obama is commissioning a new task force to address any job loss caused by the White House's proposed changes to NASA's shuttle program.
In a memo released late Monday, the president appointed Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden as co-chairs of the Task Force on Space Industry Workforce and Economic Development.
Obama's announcement arrives as members of Congress are growing increasingly skeptical of his NASA budget, which the White House has already revised in response to lawmakers' concerns once this year.
Members of both parties, especially those who represent states and districts that are also home to key NASA bases, have primarily focused their criticism on Obama's plan to end the Constellation program -- a mission founded by former President George. W. Bush to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
While Obama has long described an end to that program as inevitable, mostly because NASA lacks the technology to complete that mission in the near future, critics retort that it would ultimately leave the agency without a long-term mission -- and consequently would force many of its workers out of their jobs.
One estimate even predicted as many as 10,000 jobs across the country could be eliminated as part of the president's first draft of the 2011 NASA budget. Those figures quickly prompted Bolden, who supports the White House's plan, to label the matter a "very serious and real concern" for his agency.
"But this is what we call progress, unfortunately," he said in an interview last month. "If you look at every area of technology in this country, as you advance there are fewer and fewer manual-type jobs. That's what happens when you advance technology."
Obama's budget would attempt to stem that fallout by setting aside $40 million "to help the Space Coast," the home of Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The money would be used chiefly to "transform their economies and prepare their workers for the realities of tomorrow," according to the Monday memo.
To do that effectively, the task force would have to devise "an interagency action plan to facillitate economic development" and assist "affected aerospace workers so they are equipped to contribute" to the newly re-tooled NASA. The commission would have until August 15, 2010 to finalize its report, and would be dissolved within three years, the memo notes.
"The men and women who work in Florida's aerospace industry are some of the most talented and highly trained in the nation," Obama explained in his order. "It is critical that their skills are tapped as we transform and expand the country's space exploration efforts."
(This post was updated at 3:42 p.m. to clarify the space shuttle program was facing cuts.)
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