reporter: how does that affect how americans feel about government spend something let s take the president s plan to save $3.5 billion by ending nasa s effort to put men back on the moon. if you earn $15,000, you ll save about 1.62. however, if you make between 200, $250,000, that will save you about $95. so what do you think? go to foxnews.com/your money and you can vote. what s more important, killing the constellation program to help balance the budget or putting men back on the moon? this, jon, is a nightmare for a lot of people because it s so expensive, but when you go to foxnews.com, we have several different programs up there that allow you to judge how you want your money spent. jon: and we re going to be talking a little later on with former shuttle astronaut tom jones about this controversy. william la jeunesse, thank you. jane: we re watching an air
john, president obama says the new focus will actually create jobs? reporter: yeah, that s right. kyra, it s important to put this in reference to how we got here. a couple of months ago when the administration announced the first new vision, it canceled the constellation program. it set no timetable for a new heavy lift vehicle that could take astronauts to the moon or to mars. turned over large chunks of the futures on the tourt commercial sector and the private sector. that raised huge problems on capitol hill with members of congress and within the industry. so the president is coming here today to outline a new new vision and this new, new vision basically says by 2015 there will be a new design for a heavy lift rock tote take astronauts to asteroids and perhaps on to mars and back to the moon. it will create perhaps 2500 new jobs to offset the several thousand that we lost when the space shuttle is retired and
event. bill: and that would be. if i may, here, just to ber ject for a moment here, if we go this route, there will be a prd of years where the united states of america s relying on the russians to get us to the international space station. are you comfortable with that? no, i m not comfortable with it, but when that decision was made in january of 2004, we had six years to appropriately prepare for retiring the shuttle in 2010. i don t believe we took the appropriate actions by designing two rockets to take us to the moon, when one rocket would have been much better. but we re now reevaluating that, and i agree that we should not follow the constellation program s objective of going back to the moon. we can, instead of aries-1 and aire-5, we should have
underneath his fingernails. the records did not sell at auction, good news for sir tom who will be 70 in june. he was knighted about four years ago. jon: and guess who we ve got now? tom jones! not the singer, this guy is an astronaut and very smart guy. dr. tom jones is with us to talk about president obama. he s enroute to the kennedy space center in florida to unveil his administration s plans for the future of the u.s. space program. so far the white house has axed the constellation program that would have sent astronauts back to the moon. the president wants to put private companies at the forefront of u.s. space exploration. critics including veterans of the apollo program like neil armstrong, the first guy to walk on the moon, and fellow astronauts jim lovell and gene cernan don t like all of this. some people are staging a save space rally outside the space
center today. on the other hand, former apollo astronaut buzz aldrin and the first woman in space, sally ride, getting behind the president s plans. so let s talk about it with former nasa astronaut, fox news contributor as well tom jones. do you sing, tom? [laughter] only in the shower, jon. jon: all right. so sum up what the president is saying here. what s he planning, why is he canceling that one program and why are so many people so upset about it? well, back in february he did cancel the constellation program to put astronauts beyond the space station towards the moon, and he also called for the commercial sector to replace all of nasa s rockets capable of reaching the space station. and those two proposals met with a lot of criticism, and so what he s doing today, i think, is going to back off a little bit in response to that criticism. he s conserving one part, the orr rye onspace capsule, and says he ll park it as an