HUNTSVILLE, AL -- Anxiety about the future of manned space flight - and 2,200 local jobs - is building amid reports that President Obama will propose a 2011 NASA budget Monday that weakens or kills the Constellation program, which includes the Ares I and Ares V rockets.

"President Obama's decision, if it is indeed to be as is rumored today, leaves NASA and the nation with no program, no plan, and no commitment to any human spaceflight program beyond that of today - the last few flights of the Space Shuttle to complete the International Space Station," Dr. Mike Griffin, former NASA administrator and now eminent scholar at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said Wednesday.

"I've read what you've read," said Steve Cook, who ran the Ares rocket component of Constellation at Marshall Space Flight Center from conception until leaving for a job in industry in September.

"This is just a lot of speculation," Cook said Wednesday. "We just need to wait and see what the president does."

Constellation employs about 1,500 contractor employees and 700 government workers at Marshall Space Flight Center, Cook said.

Both Cook and Huntsville attorney Mark McDaniel, who advises members of Congress on space matters, pointed out that the president's budget is the beginning, not the end, of the discussion.

Any plan that seriously cuts Constellation will prompt "a helluva fight" with Congress, McDaniel said, also cautioning against overreaction.

With the budget due Monday, leaks and speculation have appeared almost daily this week in the national press, including:

* A Monday Wall Street Journal report that the administration will let commercial rocket companies compete to develop a new rocket to carry astronauts to and from the space station.

* A Wednesday New York Times report that NASA will be asked to study, again, what comes after the shuttle.

* A report released on the Orlando Sentinel's Web site late Tuesday, based largely on anonymous sources, saying:

* An update from the Orlando Sentinel, posted to the Web site Wednesday night, with a headline claiming the Ares program to be dead.

Griffin, NASA administrator under President George W. Bush, saw little distinction between killing Constellation and giving billions to commercial rockets.

"If you take $3- or $4 billion and pump it into the as-yet-non-existent commercial spaceflight industry," Griffin said, "and if the NASA budget stays level, then the money can only come from Constellation, so a cancellation by strangulation, even if one doesn't stand up and say 'I'm canceling Constellation,' I'm interested in outcome not verbiage."

Others doubt the president really wants that "helluva fight" fight with Congress.

"I can't imagine they'd want to spend a huge amount of political capital on it," said former astronaut and aerospace consultant Scott "Doc" Horowitz. "Why would they want to do that?"

One reason, some observers speculated this week, is to reward contributors to the president's election campaign. One of them, Elon Musk, is the founder of a company called Space X, which stands for Space Exploration Technologies.

Commercial rockets carrying humans is a hot button issue.

"Why are they called commercial if all they get is government money?" Horowitz asked.

Others question the safety challenge of unproven technology.

"Both the current and former NASA administrators are on record registering their doubts regarding the safety of these new commercial contractors," U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa, noted last year.

Shelby has already taken his stand on the bigger issue.

"If we are to maintain our leadership in space, the work on Constellation must continue with the further development of the Ares vehicles, which provide the safest and most capable transport of our astronauts to the space station, the moon, and beyond," he said in a statement in October. "Without Ares, the backbone of the Constellation program, there will be no successful U.S. human exploration program at NASA."

No matter what happens, if America is going into space, it will need the expertise assembled at Marshall, McDaniel said.

"Marshall will be front and center in anything NASA does," he said. "I don't think it's an 'oh, no' situation. The best and the brightest are here."