Sen. Rubio asks ‘what’s next for NASA’ after final shuttle flight

{mosads}Rubio and other Florida Republicans have criticized the Obama administration for the end of the space program, though the decision to retire the space shuttles was originally made under former President George W. Bush in 2004.

Without it, Rubio said the U.S. will be reliant on foreign countries for space travel. 
 
“We know that for the next few years, we’ll have to rely on the Russians to get us to space. Just a few weeks ago, that only cost $50 million an astronaut. Now the price tag is up to $63 million per astronaut. We can only imagine it will go higher.

“Whereas America once led the way to the moon, we now face the unacceptable prospect of limited options to simply get a human into orbit,” he continued. “We know that our commercial space partners are working to fill some of the gap in our human space flight capabilities, and that is a promising development that we should encourage. But we need NASA to lead.”

It is important because “space exploration speaks volumes about America, who we are as a people and as a nation,” Rubio also said.

“When America was born 235 years ago, surely our founding fathers could not fathom that one day our people would fly amongst the stars,” he said. “But the truth is it has always been our destiny. In the 19th century, it became our manifest destiny to explore and push westward until the American land stretched from sea to shining sea. And once we reached as far west as we could, Americans had no choice but to gaze up to the sky and settle on the stars as our next frontier.”

The space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to take off Friday morning at 11:26 a.m., though weather forecasts of rain are threatening the launch. After its flight, to the International Space Station, Atlantis will be retired at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.