NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden told a town hall meeting today that $30 million of the $40 million that President Barack Obama dedicated to helping the Space Coast would go toward spurring job growth.
The remaining $10 million would be used for job training.
Bolden and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke gathered with others at the Orlando Airport Hyatt Hotel for a town hall on helping the Space Coast economy survive the end of the shuttle program, which is expected to lead to about 8,000 layoffs at Kennedy Space Center.
Bolden and Locke are co-chairs of a high-level task force created by Obama and ordered to report back to him by Aug. 15.
The main theme of the meeting: the region's highly skilled workforce can't be allowed to disappear.
Space Florida President Frank DiBello opened the meeting on an optimistic note.
"While the challenges are significant, they also provide opportunities for us a region," DiBello told the several dozen people in attendance, including U.S. Rep Suzanne Kosmas, D-New Smyrna Beach, and U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Orlando.
The multi-agency task force, funded with $40 million, hopes to help diversity the region's economy.
Among those in attendance were KSC Chief Bob Cabana, State. Sen. Mike Haridopolos and Lynda Weatherman, president of the Economic Development Commission.
-John McCarthy
Space news and analysis from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral 
7 comments:
Look it's magic!
Imagine this: a conferee gets up to speak, "Here we are in Houston, I mean Titusville, to discuss how are we going to spend 40 million US TAXPAYER dollars to amend the future unemployment conditions on the Space Coast of Florida caused by the end of the Space Shuttle Program". "But wait, we are not in Houston, nor even Titusville, Since we are here lets just go to Disney World".
The new jobs will be in Arizona helping patrol the border.
F/t forgot to mention that the TF members are:
"The Secretary of Commerce and the Administrator of NASA shall serve as Co-Chairs of the Task Force.
(a) Membership of the Task Force. In addition to the Co-Chairs, the Task Force shall consist of the following members:
(i) the Secretary of Defense;
(ii) the Secretary of Labor;
(iii) the Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development;
(iv) the Secretary of Transportation;
(v) the Secretary of Education;
(vi) the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers;
(vii) the Director of the Office of Management
and Budget;
(viii) the Administrator of the Small Business
Administration;
(ix) the Director of National Intelligence;
(x) the Director of the Office of Science
and Technology Policy;
(xi) the Director of the National Economic Council; and
(xii) the heads of such other executive departments,
agencies, and offices as the President may,
from time to time, designate.
Held at the Orlando airport?? why?? We don't have any convention space here on the space coast?? or are they afraid of the people over here, afterall the president would not even meet with the people he lied too 2 years ago.. this is all about the money everyone wants to get their hand on.. not the employees..
Sorry we didn't plan better for the end of the shuttle era. Here's $40M, feel better now? Oh, blame the president, yeah that's the ticket, this has only be brewing for 2 years. What rubes you are.
One of the Anonymous cowards wrote:
"Sorry we didn't plan better for the end of the shuttle era. Here's $40M, feel better now? Oh, blame the president, yeah that's the ticket, this has only be brewing for 2 years. What rubes you are."
Bush proposed cancelling Shuttle in January 2004. Less than two weeks later, the Senate Commerce Committee held its first hearing into the proposal.
Then-NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe was asked by a Senator what the Bush administration intended to do about all the thousands of Shuttle workers who would lose their jobs when the program came to an end in 2010.
He said, “We'll have to work out those challenges at that time."
So the Bush administration had no interest in planning for jobs transition. It was after Bush was leaving office in January 2009. The problem was left for the next guy to clean up.
Particularly interesting is that almost no one in Space Coast complained about Bush cancelling Shuttle all those years ago. I spent a couple hours in the Cocoa library reading the Florida Today microfilms of the newspapers published for a month after Bush made the proposal. The paper warned thousands of jobs would be at risk, and that we'd have no replacement for at least four years if not longer, and that the Bush Administration was negotiating with the Russians to fly U.S. astronauts on Soyuz until a replacement was ready.
Yet there wasn't a single complaint letter to the paper, other than one guy who claimed Bush was conspiring to send space jobs to China and Russia. (Sounds familiar ...)
All you hypocrites had more than six years to say something, to do something, but you sat on your derrieres and did nothing.
www.spaceksc.com
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