Bolden: NASA needs a big rocket and jobs at KSC

ORLANDO — NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden told reporters at Kennedy Space Center Saturday he expects NASA to launch a big rocket in the 2020s that would pave the way for human exploration of space beyond low Earth orbit.

“The nation needs a heavy-lift launch vehicle
capability,” said Bolden, speaking on the eve of Sunday’s launch of
Endeavour, the fifth-to-last shuttle mission. “Ideally, I would like to
be flying a heavy-lift capability between 2020 and 2030.”

That milestone begins filling in the blanks of a broad new policy — outlined by the White House earlier this week — which cancels NASA’s Constellation moon program and relies on commercial spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station after the shuttle is retired this year.

Left vague were plans as to how the new NASA would actually meet President Barack Obama’s goal of sending astronauts back to the moon or to nearby asteroids.
Bolden said it was “critical” to keep plans for heavy-lift rockets.

Bolden also left open the possibility that NASA
would find ways to still use pieces of Constellation, which aimed to
return astronauts to the station by 2015 and the moon by 2020 but was
killed by the Obama administration because technical and financial
problems made those goals impossible.

“We may actually end up carve out some sub-systems
that are in the current Constellation program,” said Bolden,
specifically naming a group designing surface rovers called Desert
RATS. “While we will phase out the Constellation per se, I don’t want
to throw away the baby with the bathwater.”

The White House plans have sapped morale at the Kennedy Space Center,
where 7,000 workers already expect to lose their jobs when the space
shuttle retires later this year. Many were hoping to find work with the
Constellation moon program.

Bolden said he hoped private rockets, which the Obama administration wants to replace the shuttle with, will keep jobs in Florida.

“We’re trying to work with commercial entities to come to Space Coast
to identify the kinds of jobs you all have and the kinds of jobs they
need and see if we can marry them up as soon as possible,” he said. “We
can get to where we want to be a lot quicker if we use what’s here,
rather than build all new.”

Bolden said NASA’s success depends on the ability of the agency to help the commercial industry step in to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. He also said NASA will work closely with international partners to explore space, as well as expand research at the International Space Station until 2020.

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