Those were the days

FOR nearly 50 years the Johnson Space Centre in Houston has dominated the city's cultural and economic life. Francie Newsom, a teacher at the centre's museum, reckons that astronauts in Houston are like movie stars in Los Angeles: a normal part of the landscape. They shop for groceries and take their children to baseball practice. In her previous career, as a horse trainer, she gave some of them riding lessons. But the Space Centre is also an economic anchor for the region. It employs more than 18,000 people, and the statewide economic impact of NASA spending in 2009 was nearly $3 billion. It has helped draw about 50 aerospace contractors to the region, lured by several billion dollars'-worth of government contracts.

America's last space-shuttle launch is scheduled for July 8th. With the end of the programme, NASA estimates that several thousand jobs will be lost around the country between agency employees and contractors. But the actual figure could be much higher, depending on spillover effects and the response from the private sector. Earlier this month, for example, Boeing announced that it would lay off more than 500 people working in its space-exploration division.

The job losses will be most extensive in Texas and in Florida, home of the Kennedy Space Centre and Cape Canaveral. They will be especially painful for Florida, which had a 10.6% unemployment rate last month—a grim figure that nevertheless marks a two-year low. Houston has a more resilient economy, but it worries about a brain drain. Bob Mitchell, the president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, reckons that up to 4,000 people will lose their jobs with the end of the programme. He worries that if they move away, their expertise will be lost for ever. His group is trying to help them find new work in the region. If Houston can keep its aerospace engineers for a few years, he hopes, America may meanwhile get a new president who is more interested in space.

That would probably require Americans themselves to show more interest. Enthusiasm for the programme is not what it was, even in the cities that were once overrun with astronauts. In April, for example, NASA announced that the Enterprise, Atlantis and Discovery shuttles will retire to New York, Florida and Virginia. Some people in Houston suspected favouritism. Wayne Hale, formerly the space-shuttle programme manager at NASA, took a blunter view on his blog: “Houston didn't get an orbiter because Houston didn't deserve it,” he wrote, explaining that people had become too complacent.

George Abbey, a former director of the Johnson Space Centre and now a space-policy expert at Houston's Rice University, has similar worries. In a paper written in 2009 he and Neal Lane, a colleague at Rice, argued that America's space programme has suffered from policies with much broader economic consequences, such as export controls on aerospace technology and restrictions on visas for highly skilled scientists and engineers. These are short-sighted policies in an increasingly competitive world. “We don't make a lot of products in this country any more,” he warns. “The only area where we've been able to maintain a leadership role is in technology.” NASA says that the shuttles will be succeeded by new leaps forward. If those fail to materialise, it is not just Florida and Texas that will lose out.