Barney T. Bishop

After promising -- twice -- during his campaign to preserve America’s space program, the president demonstrated an unfortunate lack of vision for the future of manned space flights. He proved his rhetoric was as hollow as his promises -- mere  attempts to woo the people of the Space Coast so that he could win their votes for his election.

Thus, as it stands now, when the Space Shuttle is retired later this year, or early in 2011, America will have to rely on the Russians, European nations, or perhaps some as-yet-unnamed country to get our astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).

Why on earth would America want to rely on foreign governments, some of which hold values so incompatible with our own? They should send Americans to the ISS?

What happens if these governments don’t want to fly our folks to the ISS? Interestingly, and not coincidentally, the Russians raised the price for a human to go into space from $25 million to $50 million on the very same day the president announced we would no longer send Americans into space! What price do you think they'll charge once the shuttle is retired? Why wouldn't the price continue to increase once the Russians know that we have few, if any, other options?

America’s national security is at stake. But few Americans, or Floridians, seem to appreciate the magnitude of this critically important matter.

Florida’s Congressional delegation collectively has not even issued a statement – for or against -- the president’s proposal. Although U.S. Senator George LeMieux has just authored an op-ed in Florida Today that hits all of the right points in arguing that the president has made a serious mistake in his NASA budget proposal. And Congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas and Congressman Bill Posey both were outspoken at the recent Space Summit in Orlando when it came to what could and should be done to right this terrible and shortsighted wrong.

With Florida having the fourth largest delegation in Congress, it's unfathomable that our delegation members have collectively remained silent on this huge challenge to Florida’s economy, which also has dire consequences for America’s space leadership role in the world.

We are looking at 7,000 direct jobs lost because of the impending shutdown of both the Shuttle and the Constellation programs and each of these jobs earn workers an average of more than $77,000 annually! These are not the type of workers who turn to unemployment. Many are going to leave Florida and the resulting brain drain will be as devastating to our state as a similar loss was in the aftermath of the Apollo program's demise.

In addition, Florida will lose 13,000 indirect (subcontractor) jobs at a time when the state is already pushing a 12 percent unemployment rate.

What was the president thinking? Well, he wasn’t thinking about Florida because despite the fact that he says his administration is focused on creating jobs, he just hit the unemployment grand slam  by committing 22,000 Floridians to the unemployment rolls. The resulting job loss in other states that depend on the Constellation program will also be significant.