Romney makes no promise of funding

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney greets friend and supporter Jim Stelling at a space industry roundtable Monday. Rudy Giuliani met with the roundtable Friday. John McCain declined the invitation. Mike Huckabee has not responded to the invitation from the space industry group.

On a private tour of Kennedy Space Center, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney peeked into the space shuttle Atlantis on Monday and didn't whiff the smell of new hardware in the aging spacecraft.

But the Republican candidate, now the Florida frontrunner, wasn't prepared to pledge another billion or two, if elected, to freshen NASA's prospects of maintaining a human space program past 2010, when the last shuttle flight is scheduled. A "gap" of at least five years is expected before the U.S. will develop and fly another spacecraft with human passengers. Thousands of jobs could be lost in Brevard County.

"I'm prepared to study it thoroughly," said the cautious candidate, who made stops at Jacksonville, Daytona, Orlando and Cape Canaveral on Monday.

Romney reprised rival Rudy Giuliani's Friday visit with about 50 space industry members in a roundtable sponsored by the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast.

"To close the gap, it's going to take money," said Adrian Laffitte, Florida director of government relations for Lockheed Martin.

Romney listened closely but avoided promises.

"I do not have a budget for you on the gap," he said. "I'm not making promises, because I shouldn't make promises until I've studied something."

Lynda Weatherman, who leads the EDC, was not disheartened that first Giuliani and now Romney had made no pledges of budget increases to help NASA bridge the gap. Weatherman said exposing the candidates to space industry issues was only a first step.

"The money issue will come later," she said.

Romney said the U.S. faces challenges from violent Jihadists and from Asian economies, which educate many more engineers than the U.S.

"At the ground level one of the things we're going to have to do is strengthen our commitment to math and science," he said. "Technology seems to be the basis upon which a smaller nation stays ahead of a larger nation forever.

"I'm a believer in investing in research technology."

Several members of the space delegation raised the specter of the U.S. becoming an inferior nation, beholding to larger nations for leadership in space and in technology.

"What is absolutely guaranteed is that post-2010 we will be absolutely dependent on the Russians for access to our space station," said former astronaut Mike McCulley, recently retired top executive of United Space Alliance.

"I no longer believe we can eliminate the gap," he said. "The only thing we can do is minimize it."

Romney wondered aloud why the spaceflight gap seemed to have crept up on the U.S.

"I would have guessed that would have been something we would have anticipated," said Romney.