Source: Florida Today
President Barack Obama will outline a plan Thursday that would bring 2,500 more jobs to Florida’s Space Coast than the NASA moon program he aims to kill, White House officials said Tuesday.
The 4,500 to 5,500 new jobs would come in the near-term — by 2012 — offsetting by nearly 60 percent the 8,000 jobs expected to be lost at Kennedy Space Center as a result of the shutdown of NASA’s shuttle program and the administration’s proposed cancellation of Project Constellation.
At a space summit at KSC on Thursday, Obama also will announce plans to develop a smaller version of NASA’s Orion spacecraft — the crew capsule that had been part of the return-to-the-moon program.
The scaled-back capsule — which presumably could launch on either an existing Atlas or Delta rocket — would be used for emergency crew escape at the International Space Station, obviating the need to fulfill international obligations by purchasing multimillion-dollar Russian Soyuz spacecraft for that purpose.
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