The President's Budget for 2010 laid out a radically new approach for NASA that called for the investments in new technologies. In order to pay to develop these new technologies NASA was forced to cancel the Constellation program (Figure 2-1). The Constellation's boosters are solid rocket motors (SRMs). Each of these SRMs contains more than one million pounds of propellant. These SRMs, produced by Alliant Techsystems (ATK), require extensive investments in plant and equipment in order to safely mix and cast these boosters at their facility in Utah. The boosters for the Constellation program represents approximately 70% of the SRM business base for ATK. The cancellation left the SRM industrial base reeling. Thousands of people were laid off and tremendous strains were put on the entire supply chain as companies struggled to right-size. The impact was felt in the engineering (R&D) side of the house as well as on the shop floor. The impact to the industrial base (IB) was so significant that Congress directed the SECDEF "to review and establish a plan to sustain the SRM Industrial Base, including the ability to maintain and sustain currently deployed strategic and missile defense systems and to maintain intellectual and engineering capacity to support next generation rocket motors as needed."
Figure 2-1 NASA Constellation Boosters
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