Washington, April 09: NASA may not be going to the moon anytime soon and its space shuttles are about to be retired, but it could conceivably increase the number of agency jobs under a new reorganisation, NASA’s chief has said.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden yesterday said that because NASA has more money overall, it should have more jobs compared to the previous administration’s plans for a moon mission. But more of those jobs will be on research into airplanes and climate change.
NASA also plans to spend billions of dollars more over the next five years on developing new rocket technology and helping private firms build their own ships to take people to the international space station.
“You have more money and that would say you have more jobs,” Bolden said during a telephone press conference. But he said the agency has not come up with any real figures on employment and that the more-jobs claim is just based on correlation with spending.
Yesterday’s press conference outlined how NASA would change under a new space plan that President Barack Obama unveiled in February with his 2011 budget.
That space plan kills a return-to-the-moon mission, dubbed “Apollo on steroids” that his predecessor proposed in 2004. To pay for that moon mission, then-President George W Bush announced the retirement of the space shuttles by the end of 2010.
–PTI