Not even the fail whale was working...

I just caught a local PBS show in which someone from NASA (I didn't catch his name, as I came into the program right after his
introduction) shared the following bit of bad news that comes with the new Federal Budget:

"The Shuttle is 30 years old. We've been flying this machine for thirty years. Over the last year and a half, we've been transitioning to a new Constellation program and developing a new launch vehicle as well as the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle to take us back to the moon. That's the goal.

When that shuttle retires, there's going to be a serious change in workforce.

What are we going to do with all the engineers that were performing sustaining engineering on that shuttle program?

The idea was to take them and move them over into the part of the Constellation program that develops the Altair, which is a Lunar Lander going back to the moon.

Today, when President Obama rolled out his detail budget on space, he pulled the Altair and pushed it out three to five years.

So that's a real concern.

If you had asked me this morning at 8:00 if there was going to be a problem with the space industry with engineers and moving forward, I would have said no. This afternoon we've got a real concern
about that and how we're going to fill the gap with those employees.

And we've still got time. We've got a couple of years to try to convince the present Obama administration to continue to go back to the moon."