At an August 2008 rally in Titusville on Florida’s Space Coast, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama ignited supporters by promising to support the Constellation Program, NASA’s latest manned spaceflight mission.

On the campaign trail, his words couldn’t have been clearer: “Here’s what I’m committing to: Continue Constellation.”

Four years later, that vow has been broken. The Constellation Program was scrapped with Obama’s blessing in 2010, resulting in more than 7,000 layoffs at the Kennedy Space Center. It left proud workers in this region jilted and scrambling for new jobs.

As former Kennedy Space Center worker Ron Caswell said: “He came to this area and promised we were going to do things. And then he stabbed us in the back.”

A month from now, Obama will find out whether voters in coastal Brevard County, east of Orlando, will punish him at the polls for the new direction of the nation’s space program. Republicans have long held Brevard County, and there are 30,000 more registered GOP voters than Democrats now. But Obama still pulled in 45 percent of the county vote in 2008, about 3 percent more than Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004.

For decades, the region has been at the mercy of presidents and members of Congress, with politicians from both parties making dramatic decisions about NASA and the space program. In 2004, for example, then-President George W. Bush outlined a plan to end the space shuttle program in 2010, with goals of returning to the moon and exploring Mars.

“The shuttle was a great program and was very exciting to work for. It fostered a lot of pride in this community and surrounding communities,” said Titusville Mayor Jim Tulley, a former software developer who worked at Kennedy Space Center for about 25 years before he was laid off in 2009. “It was great to be a part of, but nothing lasts forever, and nothing should last forever.”

Under Obama, the Constellation change has hurt once-vibrant Space Coast cities, with unemployment in the region jumping at one point to 11.7 percent. If Obama takes the brunt of the blame, it could swing Brevard County’s vote further Republican in 2012.

Yet Space Coast unemployment has now fallen to 9.4 percent, about the same as when Obama took office, and local leaders say the area is slowly recovering on the backs of private enterprise and resilient, entrepreneurial former space workers.

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At 525 feet tall, with nearly 4 million cubic feet of space, the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center looms across the water from neighboring Titusville, home to 43,000 residents.

For four-and-a-half decades, thousands of Space Coast residents toiled in its massive maze of steel platforms. They put the first astronaut crew into space. Sent Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon. Launched 30 years worth of shuttles.

Today, the Vehicle Assembly Building is a shell of itself. On a recent afternoon, only a handful of people milled about, most working to transform it for leasing to commercial space companies.

Since 2010 at Kennedy Space Center, thousands have been laid off, launch pads have been dismantled, and machinery has been shipped off to museums. Titusville residents expected they’d still be working now on the Constellation Program, a bridge from the end of the space shuttle program.

“We knew the shuttle was being retired,” said Joe Hill, 60, of Titusville, who was laid off in April 2011 after managing a design engineering department for United Space Alliance for about 10 years. “We didn’t like it, but we knew it, and that another program was going to replace it. To pull it out, it just devastated the workforce.”

The move left Titusville residents, many highly educated and living on above-average salaries, searching for work.

Every Friday morning, roughly 50 show up at St. Gabriel’s Church just west of downtown Titusville for meetings of the Space Coast Technical Network, a group of unemployed space program staffers.

Part social gathering, part support group, part networking circle, they share new entrepreneurial endeavors and success stories of jobs acquired. When a list of jobs was read at one recent meeting, the kind of work wildly varied: project environment specialist, welder, golf pro shop attendant, school bus crossing guard.

That day, Caswell stood up during the meeting and announced his good news: after two years of unemployment, his new job at an Orlando-based tech company.”I’m about to run out of unemployment and I hadn’t hit desperation yet,” Caswell said. “But it was a knot in my stomach all the time.”

Plans to retire the shuttle program had long been known, giving workers time to build up nest eggs. Clifton Burkett, a systems engineer at Kennedy Space Center before his layoff in 2011, said he cut his cable television service three years ago and started riding his Harley Davidson more often to save gas.

But few could have foreseen the Space Coast’s current predicament.

Politically, the question becomes whether Obama’s Brevard County supporters in 2008 have soured on the president, choosing either to vote for Republican candidate Mitt Romney or stay home on Nov. 6.

“It’s very polarized,” said Marcia Gaedcke, president of the Titusville Area Chamber of Commerce. “There are a lot of people that want somebody to blame and they find somebody to blame, whoever that is.”

Depending on party affiliation, views about Obama’s change of heart vary.

Democrats often contend Obama shelved a bloated Constellation Program, choosing to shift federal dollars to more efficient private contractors. The Republican Bush administration also was responsible for ending the space shuttle program.

Many Republicans say Obama pulled the rug out from under them, devastating families and local economies. In a campaign paper released last month, Romney said Obama “failed to deliver a coherent policy for human space exploration and space security,” though Romney offered few specifics about future projects.

To Diane Jones, a 51-year-old custodial worker at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, neither candidate has shown fire when it comes to space exploration. She remains undecided.

“I don’t see their heart in space,” Jones said. “I see half-measures. But there are a lot of other issues out there.”

Allen Killip, 67, of Titusville, said he’s been so disappointed by Obama and Romney, he might vote for a third-party candidate.

I’d rather have a Republican or Democrat who felt the need for the space program to go forward than to do what’s been done,” Killip said.

While hard feelings still linger for many, Obama could benefit from the passage of time.

Since Constellation’s end in 2010, the Space Coast’s economy has started rebounding. Realizing the talent pool of educated, unemployed workers, more companies have put out feelers about moving to the Space Coast. Most notably, Utah-based Rocket Crafters, a private rocket and aerospace company, decided to relocate to Titusville, promising 1,300 jobs.

Tulley, the Titusville mayor, said the city will benefit as it transitions to a region driven by private enterprise.

“In a sense, for the last 40 years, we’ve been what one might call ‘a company town,’” Tulley said. “We were completely dependent on one source of income, and that was NASA. As we start to diversify, we become stronger.”

It’s tough to find anybody more optimistic about Titusville’s future than Karan Conklin.

As chief of staff at the local U.S. Space Walk of Fame Museum, Conklin’s job has been to honor NASA history. She runs a 2,000-square-foot museum and has helped erect four monuments to four retired space programs.

Conklin refuses to dwell on the recent doldrums. Jobs were lost following the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, she said, yet the region survived and once again thrived.

“This is basically the same thing, except it’s not a disaster,” Conklin said. “They’ll launch here again.”

–Jacob Carpenter, Naples Daily News

Tags | Brevard County, Constellation Program, John Kerry, Kennedy Space Center, obama, romney, Space Coast