Florida 'Space Coast' Sees Economic Hardship in Obama Plan

April 17, 2010 -- They have watched the plumes of fire and smoke here for 49 years, heard the roar of rocket engines, felt the ground-shaking beneath them. They joke that a love of spaceflight is programmed into their DNA, and speak proudly of fathers and grandfathers before them having worked in "the program."

So closely intertwined are the lives of Florida's Space Coast community and NASA's human spaceflight program, which since 1961 has launched mankind on hundreds of voyages of discovery, that even the telephone dialing code here is 321.

But after so many countdowns, so many launches, the clock is now ticking toward what could be a hard landing for those who depend on NASA for their livelihoods.

The pending retirement of the space shuttle fleet after three more missions -- coupled with President Obama's controversial plans to dismantle Constellation, the program in which the space agency has for the past five years been developing a new generation of vehicles to take astronauts to the moon and ultimately Mars -- will strip this area of a major economic engine, many worry.

"Spaceflight is a major part of what keeps this area alive," says Andy Gravina, of Cocoa, who works as a server administrator at Kennedy Space Center. "And there's only so much work out there if we're not flying."

About 8,000 space center workers stand to lose their jobs after the shuttle flies its final mission, scheduled for September. Constellation was to have yielded vehicles to replace it, but not for at least another four years, during which NASA must buy seats on Russian Soyuz capsules launching from Kazakhstan to get American astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

During a visit to the space center last week, President Obama argued that by terminating Constellation and channeling $6 billion to commercial spacecraft developers instead, the yawning chasm between the shuttle era ending and the next generation of vehicles coming on line will be narrowed.