Utah's Republican Congressional delegation has blasted President Obama's plan to radically reshape NASA's future space flight program.
The plan, outlined by Obama during a speech Thursday in Florida, cuts out ATK Space Systems, a major Top of Utah employer, from providing a rocket motor already in the pipeline for NASA.
Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, believes the plan will cost Utah thousands of ATK jobs.
"The president's proposal will cost taxpayers more money and will result in over 2,000 Utahns losing their jobs. This is unacceptable," wrote Bennett, responding to the speech.
Company officials would not speculate about potential job loss if the plan is fully implemented.
Obama detailed his replacement vision for NASA before a crowd at the Kennedy Space Center.
"The challenge facing our space program differs from the decades past," said Obama.
The plan includes privatizing more of the technology and commercializing the hardware to be used for space flights, including carrying astronauts to the International Space Station and perhaps Mars.
But Obama is ditching plans to head back to the moon, a major thrust for the program NASA calls the Constellation project.
"We've been there before," Obama said about another moon shot.
U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, along with ranking Republicans on the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, provided live reaction to the speech on Bishop's House Web site.
"This plan costs billions upon billions more than if we were to stay the course ... a proven course grounded in proven research and technologies," wrote Bishop during the speech.
ATK, which employs more than 2,000 people just in Box Elder County, worked several years on its part of the Constellation program that former President George W. Bush proposed as a way to revive manned missions to the moon and beyond.
ATK has been developing the engine, called Ares, to power the next generation of NASA rockets.
But Obama made it clear he was not happy with the Constellation program, which includes Ares, and said it is behind schedule and over budget.
He said he would spend $6 billion over the next five years and create 10,000 jobs in his redirected efforts to explore space.
"Unlike the previous program, we will get achievable milestones," Obama told the Kennedy crowd.
But Utah's federal delegation believes the changeover would cost 30,000 jobs nationwide and waste the money already spent in developing Ares and other parts of the existing program.
"I would say the administration's plan is laughable, but I can't find much humor in it when the consequences to space exploration and American workers during tough economic times are so dire," wrote U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
The President said his plan would be cheaper and faster than what is in the works in places like Utah.
Yet Bishop defended Ares as being on schedule and the right booster rocket for a variety of uses, including the U.S. missile defense systems. He argues canceling the Ares rocket will destroy vital components of national defense capabilities.
"The President's proposal is not about privatization. It is about taking contracts given to the private sector companies that are successful and giving those same contracts to private sector companies that continue to fall short of projections," Bishop wrote after the speech.
Obama does hope to re-purpose the Orion capsule being developed in the Constellation system.
But the ATK launch abort mechanism that is part of Orion may not be part of that new configuration.
"We believe the work we have done on Ares is valuable and it is the safest rocket that exists," said George Torres, vice president of communications for ATK Aerospace Systems.
The company employs more than 4,000 people in the state who also produce various types of non-NASA- related products.
"Ultimately, we feel this is a strong business and that we will work through the uncertainties that could drag on for several months," said Torres.
ATK officials have said in the past they hope to find other buyers down the road for products they have developed for NASA, perhaps preserving jobs.
Bishop and others vowed to lead a legislative effort to restore the Constellation program. Hearings are scheduled for next week in the U.S. Senate on the space program.
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ATK advocates say Obama's NASA plan "shortsighted"
President Obama is expected to give a major speech today in Florida on the future of NASA, but advocates of Utah-based ATK Space Systems and the rockets it builds were already attacking him Wednesday for not including ATK products in that future.
Specifically, according to advance information on Obama's speech issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, there is no place for the Ares I rocket motor that ATK has been developing.
ATK, which employs more than 2,000 people in Box Elder County, worked several years on its part of the Constellation program that former President George W. Bush proposed as a way to revive manned missions to the moon and eventually Mars.
The first version of Constellation is built around an Orion crew cabin and the Ares I rocket.
ATK has already built and tested motors for one Ares rocket, and a second test is expected this fall. Nothing beyond that is funded yet.
George Torres, spokesman for ATK Space Systems, said many space officials, especially former astronauts, have come out against canceling Constellation.
Beyond agreeing with them, Torres said Wednesday, ATK is still waiting to see what Congress, which has ultimate power over the budget, does.
"The Senate Appropriations Committee meets (next week), and they've been very strongly against it (canceling Constellation)," he said.
"At this point, it's too early to say, is the bottom line. This is just another step in the process."
The Obama plan extends the International Space Station's life by five years and puts billions into research to develop the big new rocket capable of reaching a nearby asteroid, the moon or other points in space.
Little of the existing Constellation program is included in Obama's proposal. He is expected to announce a changed role for the crew capsule, and the Ares rocket is not mentioned.
Obama is also expected to propose that the Orion crew capsule be modified and used as an escape capsule on the International Space Station.
Quick condemnation
Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, was quick to condemn the president's approach.
"The president is wasting billions of taxpayer dollars to simply reinvent the wheel and develop another rocket after canceling the safe, cost-efficient and tested Ares rocket booster," Bennett said Wednesday in a news release.
Keeping the Orion crew capsule is good, he said, but too little.
"The president took one step toward reversing his irresponsible decision to cancel NASA's program to send humans beyond low-earth orbit, but he needs to go even further and restore funding for Constellation and Ares," he said.
"The Obama administration's shortsighted vision for NASA is costly to both our national security and our state's economy."
U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, has consistently been critical of the decision.
"The alleged savings are more than offset by unintended consequences because the industrial base that builds the rocket to put people toward the moon also builds the rockets to shoot down incoming missiles from North Korea, Iran and other bad guys," he said.
"If you take the space component away, the defense side cost doubles, triples ... maybe even more."
Generation gap
The proposal by Obama has created something of a divide among older and younger space hands.
"This is a generational shift in the space program," said MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley, who served on a White House-appointed panel last year to re-evaluate the space program.
Several Internet pioneers of the 1990s are excited about the president's vision.
NASA will spend $6 billion to encourage private companies to build their own spaceships to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. They see the Obama plan as the only way to eventually get astronauts to Mars.
PayPal founder Elon Musk said his SpaceX company hopes to fly astronauts to the space station by the end of 2013.
He figures to charge NASA about $20 million per astronaut. That's a bargain compared with the more than $300 million a head it was going to cost NASA under the Bush plan, and the $56 million NASA will pay Russia for trips on Soyuz rockets in the short term.
Apollo heroes lament
Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, and Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk there, as well as Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, spent much of March talking about how much they dislike the change in space priorities, Cernan said.
"We have just given up manned spaceflight," he said. "It is the demise of American people in space except in someone else's vehicle. This is a catastrophe."
Lovell said the concept of putting more money into technology is fine, but the plan lacks vision.
"The whole idea of any program is, you have to set a goal," Lovell said. "You don't just build technology and figure out what to do with it. ... The whole thing is flawed."
And Armstrong, a famously private person, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that he had "substantial reservations" about the Obama plan.
The split is not entirely along generational lines: Buzz Aldrin, Armstrong's Apollo 11 moonwalking partner back in 1969, has publicly supported the president's plan, while some younger shuttle astronauts oppose it.
On Monday, 27 former astronauts and senior NASA officials -- including Bush's NASA chief, Michael Griffin -- wrote an open letter to the president, contending that canceling the moon program would cede American leadership in space technology.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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