Aerospace Industry Economic Indicator revealed by Dr. Saul Barr

“Space Coast workers anxious ahead of Obama's speech today on NASA's future

ByEliot Kleinberg

Palm Beach Post Staff WriterSmall Type

COCOA BEACH — Back when the guys with the Right Stuff first started bellying up to the bar here at the Surf a half century ago, the Space Coast wasn't called that. It was just a sparse stretch of U.S. 1, dotted with gas stations and mom-and-pop motels.

Photos of the original Mercury astronauts hang at the entryway to this beachfront restaurant and bar — there's John Glenn in 1962, his motorcade passing right by the Surf — as do the faces of those who followed them, through Gemini, Apollo, and, for the last three decades, the Space Shuttle.

But the last shuttle flight is set for this fall. After that? For the folks knocking back brews, this isn't Happy Hour; more like Anxious Hour. They want to know whether they'll have a job next year.

President Obama comes to town today to deliver specifics.

Parts of the plan were reported Wednesday; they say the White House will back off on the idea, outlined in February in its proposed budget, to shelve the Orion rocket, which was to replace the shuttle.

Orion still won't go to the moon. Instead, it will be used as an unmanned emergency vehicle that would lash up alongside the International Space Station as an emergency return vehicle, the White House said.

And NASA would put billions into research to speed up development of a massive rocket that would send people and cargo to deep space, although it didn't say where. It would pick a design by 2015.

"A rocket without a destination would be a giant leap backward for America's space program," Florida U.S. Sen. George LeMieux, who's submitted a bill to preserve the Constellation program, said Wednesday. "Promises to make decisions later will surrender our leadership in manned space exploration."

The Obama space plan still relies on private companies to fly to the space station. Russia currently charges about $50 million per passenger. The commercial space industry on Tuesday released a study saying that would result in 11,800 jobs. But Space Coast groups have estimated a net local job loss of anywhere from 7,000 to 23,000.

The White House says its new plan would mean 2,500 more Florida jobs than the one outlined by then-president George W. Bush and since discarded by the White House.

On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center and has submitted a bill that would give space workers incentives to convert to teachers, called the new plan "an encouraging development."

But on Monday, Marion Blakey, head of the Aerospace Industries Association, told the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, "The best and the brightest are not going to hang around on the assumption that at some point our space program is going to start up again."

Meanwhile, thousands of space workers, politicians and leaders of local businesses held a "Save our Space" rally in Cocoa on Sunday.

Bob Sirianni, who sells real estate and vacation properties, moved from Pittsburgh two decades ago. He doesn't know this place when there wasn't a space shuttle. The day he and his family arrived, he says, they unpacked and "left that afternoon for the Kennedy Space Center."

It's an economic triangle; the economic clout of the space workers, the general tourism that dates back to the area's early surfing days, and the tourism directly from the space program, which can draw tens of thousands for a single shuttle launch.

And, Sirianni said, finishing off his Grey Goose martini, if the tourists who still come see empty storefronts, they'll be turned off and plan to go elsewhere.

"Everybody's going to get hurt," said Gene Kolsch, head waiter for two decades. "There's no doubt about it."

Neil Armstrong, the first man to step on the moon, as well as other veteran Apollo astronauts and former senior NASA managers, had attacked the February Obama plan, saying it meant the death knell for America's leadership in space.

More than two dozen Apollo-era veterans signed a letter calling the plan a "misguided proposal that forces NASA out of human space operations for the foreseeable future."

And in an open letter Monday from Space Florida, the Florida AFL-CIO, the Associated Industries of Florida and the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast said, in part, "your administration's commitment to our nation's overall human spaceflight endeavor, as well as tens of thousands of jobs related to the space industry in Florida and across the country, are in question."