Hatch: President's Plans For NASA Space Program Misguided

Press Release

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, today called President Obama's plan for returning the U.S. to space thoroughly misguided, saying it will waste years of time, billions of dollars and cost thousands of jobs in Utah and elsewhere across the nation.

"This is getting silly. The President's plan wastes billions of dollars and years of valuable time," said Hatch. "I would say the administration's plan is laughable, but I can't find much humor in it when the consequences to space exploration and American workers during tough economic times are so dire."

Speaking today at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the president outlined his revised plan, which, despite speculation to the contrary, will effectively scrap Project Constellation and the Ares rocket program. The administration's plan calls for doling out huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to commercial businesses, many inexperienced in human space flight, to build craft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

"First, they want to throw away our nation's $10 billion investment in Project Constellation and the successfully-tested Ares rocket. Then they want to give away billions more to build something less capable than what we already have. President John F. Kennedy would be rolling over in his grave. This decision reeks of politics, not common sense," Hatch said. "Former astronauts Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and James Lovell and Eugene Cernan were right in saying that if we follow the president's plan, "we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what will be discarded."

Project Constellation would return American astronauts to the Moon and lay the foundation for the exploration of Mars. The Ares 1 rocket can carry astronauts to the International Space Station and send them beyond low-Earth orbit, while its heavy-lift relative, Ares V, is designed to carry the equipment for future space exploration missions.

Ares is equipped to perform a variety of missions, including sending astronauts to the Space Station and it can go beyond low-Earth orbit so it can be used as the foundation for any space exploration program the nation decides to take on. Recent NASA studies have shown the Ares rocket is ten times as safe as the Space Shuttle and twice as safe as the systems being developed by private industry.

Hatch also takes issue with the president's assertion that his plan, which calls for taking five years to study heavy-lift rocket technology before picking which rocket to develop, will return America to space quicker than Project Constellation.

"It strains credulity to the breaking point to assume the major work on a rocket using technology that doesn't even exist yet will be built sooner and at a comparable cost than what we already have," Hatch concluded.

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