Source: The Denver Post
While saving 4,000 jobs in Colorado helps the local economy, tough choices remain about how to rein in federal spending.
Count us among those relieved to see that work on the Orion spacecraft will continue in Colorado.
In what turned into a frenzied nail-biter, Colorado’s political elite scrambled to save the Orion program and the 1,000 direct jobs and additional 3,000 indirect jobs it provides in the state. But while saving a version of the multibillion-dollar program is good for the recovering local economy, its precarious rescue illustrates two serious challenges for our state and nation going forward.
President Barack Obama assembled a team of top scientists and space experts to evaluate the usefulness of an older Bush administration plan to chart the future of American space exploration.
That review led Obama to believe that Bush’s Constellation program, which included the Orion capsule, was unworkable and lacking in innovation.
In February, Obama called for the Constellation program to be dismantled; he hoped to launch a new era of space exploration that combined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with new investment from the private sector.
Obama’s goal was to infuse the NASA mission with new energy from America’s high-tech entrepreneurs. Instead of replacing the space shuttle program with the Orion spacecraft, private enterprise would usher in the next generation of spacecraft.
By most estimates, the president’s last-minute decision to maintain a version of the Orion program was based on politics.
Colorado is a swing state containing key and vulnerable races for Democrats, and the loss of the $8 billion program could have been devastating for Sen. Michael Bennet and other Democrats. Even Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper joined the fight.
In reports last week, The Denver Post’s Michael Riley outlined a series of back-channel negotiations on the part of Hickenlooper, Bennet, Sen. Mark Udall and Rep. Ed Perlmutter.
Among the Democrats’ top arguments for keeping the spacecraft — even in its new downgraded role as a rescue unit for the space station — was the delicate political environment their party now faces here.
For a nation that needs to make tough choices about structural changes in the overall budget to rein in out-of-control spending, the political fight over keeping the Orion spacecraft under construction ought to prove instructive.
The political skirmish perfectly illustrates how difficult it is for any president to implement significant structural changes to large federal programs. Most every line item of the budget has some strong constituency to fight for it.
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