President Obama will spell out his vision for the future of American astronauts in space at a conference that the administration is planning for Florida next month.
That pleases Florida lawmakers, who have criticized the administration’s desire to eliminate NASA’s program to send astronauts back to the Moon.
“The president’s upcoming space meeting here in Florida provides a chance for meaningful progress,” said Representative Suzanne M. Kosmas, whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center. She requested a meeting when she and others in the state Congressional delegation met last month with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, and John P. Holdren, Mr. Obama’s science adviser.
The conference will be held April 15. A White House spokesman said Monday that other details, including the agenda, the location and who would be attending, were not yet available.
NASA has spent five years and $9 billion on the Constellation moon program. The president’s 2011 budget would cancel all of it. The budget also seeks to nurture the commercial space industry by turning to private companies for transportation to the International Space Station and and to invest in new technologies to make future exploration of the solar system easier and cheaper.
The budget request would increase NASA’s budget by $300 million, to $19 billion. Mr. Obama, however, has said little publicly about the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
“This is an area where presidential leadership can have an impact in getting acceptance on the new strategy,” said John M. Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University.
Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, said he hoped Mr. Obama would use the meeting to lay out a goal and a timetable for sending astronauts to Mars. Mr. Nelson has suggested continuing parts of Constellation, including the Orion crew capsule and the Ares I rocket as a test vehicle for a future heavy-lift rocket.
Even as the administration called Constellation “fundamentally un-executable” on Sunday in announcing the meeting, the program passed a two-day preliminary design review last week. In an e-mail message to people working on Constellation, Lauri N. Hansen, the lead for systems engineering and integration, wrote, “The final results showed that we have a sound design.”
Joseph R. Fragola, a safety consultant, said the review had found no critical flaws for Constellation. “Money is the problem,” he said. “It’s not technical.”
A blue-ribbon panel concluded last year that NASA would need a boost of $4.5 billion to $6 billion a year for Constellation to achieve its Moon goals.
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