NASA managers have a challenging balancing act ahead of them this year as they oversee the last five missions of the space shuttle program and prepare the agency for a future that is increasingly cloudy and uncertain.

Credit: Justin Ray/Spaceflight Now

Up to 7,000 workers at Kennedy Space Center stand to lose their jobs with the retirement of the shuttle fleet in September. Countless others around the country will also lose their jobs or be reassigned to new roles.

Keeping the focus on safety amid political turmoil surrounding NASA's future is falling to the space agency's program managers and other senior officials.

"The workforce down here definitely has me concerned just because they're people, and it's the last year," said Mike Moses, the shuttle launch integration manager at KSC.

"We're going to start doing some of the lasts this year. Emotionally, that's going to be hard for folks," Moses told reporters Wednesday.

Shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach is putting a razor focus on ensuring the KSC workforce continues preparing mission hardware with perfection.

"Our focus...is to process these last five flights as perfectly as we processed the first 129," Leinbach said.

The distractions are building because NASA's plans to return to the moon may fall short of that objective, if reports that President Obama plans slashing the Constellation program are true.

NASA knowingly started the countdown to the shuttle's retirement nearly five years ago, but the armada or orbiters was to be succeeded by a new family of Ares rockets that would eventually send astronauts on missions to the moon.

The moon program has been hamstrung by a lack of funding and cascading delays that widened the gap between the end of shuttle flights and the inauguration of the new space architecture.

Now, President Obama plans to cancel the Constellation program and invest federal dollars into new commercial space operators to develop a cheaper alternative to transport fliers to the International Space Station, hopefully by the middle of the decade.

The NASA budget, scheduled to be unveiled Monday, will give the first new direction to a space program that has been yearning for answers since last summer.

The budget will scrap the Constellation program, extend the space station until 2020, and fund the early development of the private "space taxis," the Orlando Sentintel first reported early Wednesday.

NASA will still have to weather the long-anticipated shock of ending a storied 30-year-old program that has long been the face of space endeavors. But, if true, the new budget will put space workers at the mercy of another -- this time unexpected -- abrupt change.

If it survives an expected wave of criticism in Congress, the White House guidance would shift NASA from an operator of piloted spacecraft to a customer of a privately-run space line.

Officials would not explicitly discuss the new policy until it is released, but Leinbach said space workers will have a tough time acclimating.

"A lot of us have a lot of years in this program," Leinbach said. "It's going to be sad to see it end, let's be honest about it."

Leinbach said the future is "cloudy" and employees are concerned. "It's not going to be the same, but I think it's good."

"Unless you believe that we're going to come out of this budget cycle with a zero line item for NASA human spaceflight, which I really hope we don't do, we're going to keep going," Moses said. "There's going to be a future, but it's going to be different."

Until September, Leinbach and other leaders will be responsible for rallying employee morale to safely fly the remaining shuttle flights and complete the assembly of the space station.

"When the guys are doing their work, they're not distracted," Leinbach said. "When they get off the job, yeah, they're talking about it and they're worried about it."

Moses said NASA organized a safety day in early January in response to the political distractions surrounding the space program.

This year's manifest will begin Feb. 7 with the launch of Endeavour with a new connecting module for the space station. Four more flights are scheduled this year to outfit the outpost with new logistics and scientific equipment. The final flight, using Discovery, is slated for launch Sept. 16.

"They also know that if they don't process these next ones perfectly, the program will stop even sooner," Leinbach said. "They know they have to do it right in order to get these last five. If we don't, we're going to get less than that."