Are All Jobs Created (or Saved) Equal?

NASA shouldn't be a jobs program

Katherine Mangu-Ward | February 4, 2010

The government has decided to stop doing something that it does badly.

That's a rare occurrence, so pause to savor it. This week, President Obama announced that he was putting the kibosh on George W. Bush's $100 billion Constellation program, which had the short term goal of getting Americans back on the moon by 2020. This was a reasonable response to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) recent history with manned missions—a long, sad tale of bureaucratic woe, complete with unreliable cost estimates, missed deadlines, and limited scientific payoff. And even this big move is far from revolutionary: NASA's overall budget will continue to grow, if only by a modest 2 percent. But federal space money is being reshuffled along with the program's priorities, and change makes people nervous.

And in Washington, D.C., an attack of the nerves generally manifests itself in howls of outrage at committee hearings. So on Tuesday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) dove right in, with a thinly veiled threat: "When the president says that he's going to cancel Constellation, I can tell you that to muster the votes and to overcome that, it's going to be very, very difficult." While Nelson—and nearly everyone else quoted below—talked about the importance of the grand vision of space exploration, when they got down to brass tacks their concerns were about constituent jobs. About 7,000 space jobs in Florida are at stake in the revision of the NASA budget.

In the traditional howl-of-outrage committee meeting of the House Armed Forces Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Rob Bishop, (R-Utah) said "thousands of people in Utah…are losing good-paying, high-tech jobs. Many of the employees at [rocket manufacturer] ATK have been with the Minuteman program for 35 years or more and have unique experience and capability that will now be lost to our country." READ MORE REASON