GALVESTON — The shuttle program will end in 2010. What to do next?

That’s exactly what NASA is trying to figure out now. It’s having a conference at the Galveston Island Convention Center at the San Luis Resort to discuss with private business what technologies will be needed for missions to the moon and beyond.

And, a legendary figure in the space program told the conference both NASA and its private partners needed to do a much better job selling the space program if they wanted public support.

The matter is no abstraction for the Galveston-Houston region. It’s feared that, once the shuttle program ends, the region will lose 3,000 to 5,000 jobs — good ones.

It’s hoped that the Constellation Program, managed out of the Johnson Space Center, will fill the gap. Under the program, NASA is developing the Orion crew module and Ares rockets to take their place.

NASA hopes to send Orion to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars.

“The end of the shuttle program doesn’t mean we’re going out of business,” Jeffrey Hanley, manager of the Constellation Program, said Wednesday. “We’re, as an agency, getting into a new business.”

He was speaking at NASA’s Technology Exchange Conference. The idea of the two-day event was to get NASA experts in the same rooms as experts from private industry and figure out how best to solve the enormous technical hurdles that lie between Cape Kennedy and the Red Planet.

The space program also faces a huge hurdle of a nontechnical nature, Gene Kranz told a luncheon audience.

NASA and its private partners thus far have done a poor job of selling the public on a program that will be expensive, risky, will take a long time to succeed and will suffer failures along the way.

Kranz knows of what he speaks.

He’s best known as the lead flight director of Apollo 13, which returned to Earth after an explosion in the service module crippled the spacecraft. Actor Ed Harris played him in the movie.

Kranz’ “Tiger Team” of flight directors had to improvise within the narrowest of margins.

They herded the crew into the lunar module to conserve power, oxygen, water and heat. Kranz described a whole series of modifications they made to the flight plan, each of which created its own complications that had to be solved. By the time the capsule splashed down on April 17, 1970, it had 27 minutes of power left.

That was hardly the only close call in the space program.

Kranz said the early Gemini flights were extremely dicey. He was in mission control on Jan. 27, 1967, when the Apollo 1 spacecraft burned during a training exercise.

“We listened to the screams of our crew as they died,” Kranz said. “We knew we were responsible for America’s first space flight disaster.”

Out of that, the members of the NASA team came up with a slogan by which they hoped to live: “tough and competent.”

And for the most part, they did, overcoming a host of difficulties and averting several near disasters:

•Shortly after liftoff, Apollo 12 was struck by lightning, temporarily knocking out the command module’s instruments and the data sent back to Earth. The crew and the flight team had to scramble to figure out how to make sure accurate information was making its way back to mission control.

•A loose ball of solder in a switch sent a false “abort” message from the Apollo 14 command module. Ground teams had to jury rig a software solution to the problem.

•After an especially long stay on the moon, crewmen David Scott and James Irwin were suffering what Kranz called “cardiac events.” They were exhausted, and the potassium in their bodies was depleted.

“The Apollo Program was a lot closer and a lot dicier than a lot of people have recognized,” Kranz said.

He encouraged his audience to make alliances with people in the media, speak at Rotary Club functions and find other ways to directly engage the public. If people are aware beforehand of the risks inherent in space flight, they will support the Constellation Program when it suffers reverses, Kranz said.

He said NASA hadn’t done enough of that after the Challenger explosion in the shuttle program. That’s why the Columbia disaster took the public by surprise.

More broadly, NASA and its partners need to get out and sell the public on the Constellation Program despite the great difficulties it entails, Kranz said. And that means spreading the word about what it promises.

“Public support for the space program is very broad and it’s very thin,” he said.Ga