The highway to space cuts across dozens of districts but few are more vested in America’s off-planet endeavors than central Florida, home to the Kennedy Space Center, the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and blueprints for a state-run commercial space zone.

Perhaps that’s why after visits to the area last week both John McCain and Barack Obama released statements clarifying their visions for space exploration. If you’re looking for an issue that delineates some of the differences between the presidential candidates, keep looking: Both McCain and Obama advocate a strong civilian space program and agree with the current administration’s plan to retire the space shuttles and develop a new family of boosters and capsules under a program NASA calls Constellation.

Obama gets into a bit more detail than his Republican rival, calling for at least one more space shuttle flight beyond the 10 already on the books. This presumably would be used to fly an internationally developed physics instrument called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which has been spearheaded by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from MIT named Samuel Ting.

Both candidates talk about closing the five-year gap between the shuttles’ retirement and the debut flights of the new ship when the United States will be without means to launch people into orbit. Neither, however, detail how to pay for keeping the shuttle flying beyond 2010 while still maintaining or even increasing funding for its replacement.

Obama also mentions a new role for NASA -- leading efforts to break the country’s dependence on foreign energy sources. He also plans to revive a top-level space advisory group to “oversee a comprehensive and integrated strategy and policy dealing with all aspects of the government’s space-related programs, including those being managed by NASA, the Department of Defense, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Commerce Department, the Transportation Department, and other federal agencies.”

McCain may be fleshing out his plans after a pow-wow on Monday at Brevard Community College in Cocoa, Fla., with aerospace executives and regional economic development advisors trying to find ways to offset the thousands of job cuts expected as the shuttle program winds down.

Here’s hoping someone has some ideas besides asking our broke Uncle Sam if he can spare another few hundred million or so.

Click here to read Obama’s plan and here for McCain’s.

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