Vice President Pence to visit KSC next week
Vice President Mike Pence will visit Kennedy Space Center Thursday afternoon to tour spaceport facilities and address employees, NASA confirmed Friday.
The trip comes after President Trump on Friday signed an executive order re-establishing a National Space Council that Pence will chair.
Dormant since 1993, the council is intended to better coordinate policies among military, civil and commercial space programs.
“We’re going to lead again,” Trump said in a White House ceremony attended by guests including Apollo 11 moonwalker and Satellite Beach resident Buzz Aldrin. “We’re a nation of pioneers, and the next great American frontier is space.”
Pence is expected to fly into KSC’s former space shuttle runway aboard Air Force Two around noon Thursday.
At 12:50 p.m., the vice president will deliver a special address to the center’s roughly 8,000-strong work force, which includes about 2,000 NASA civil servants. NASA TV will broadcast his remarks.
Then Pence will tour KSC to learn more about its post-shuttle evolution into a multi-user spaceport that supports NASA, military and commercial missions.
Pence on June 7 visited Johnson Space Center in Houston to help introduce a new class of NASA astronauts.
“NASA will have the resources and support you need to continue to make history, to push the boundaries of human knowledge and advance American leadership to the boundless frontier of space,” he said then.
Congress currently is reviewing the Trump administration’s $19.1 billion request for NASA next year, a cut of about 3 percent.
NASA is developing the Saturn V-class Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule to return astronauts to lunar orbit and eventually Mars.
The space agency plans to launch an unmanned test flight of the SLS and Orion from KSC in 2019, followed by a first launch with astronauts by 2023.
Meanwhile, Boeing and SpaceX hope to resume launches of astronauts from U.S. soil as soon as next year, flying crews to and from the International Space Station in privately designed capsules now being developed under NASA contracts.
Source:- http://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/2017/06/30/vice-president-pence-visit-ksc-next-week/445037001/
