Lockheed Martin says it would bring
1,200 jobs to the Houston area if NASA selects the company to build the Crew Exploration
Vehicle (CEV).
John Karas, Lockheed's vice
president for space exploration, made the announcement March 24 at the
University of Houston-Clearlake before an audience of state and local
officials, including U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas).
Lockheed Martin submitted its final CEV
proposal to NASA last week. The firm is competing against a Northrop
Grumman and its teammate Boeing for a contract valued at billions of
dollars to help NASA design and build an Apollo-like
capsule that would be used to transport astronauts to the international
space station starting around 2014. The CEV would also be used in combination
with other systems to transport
astronauts to the Moon starting around 2018.
Karas said the 1,200 mostly
engineering jobs would represent about half of the Lockheed Martin team's CEV
workforce.
Lockheed Martin currently has about
800 employees in Houston spread across several NASA engineering support
contracts.
"We are following the vein that we
are going to do our CEV program with NASA side by side at the human space
flight centers and help the transition from shuttle and station to CEV," Karas
said in an interview.
NASA's Johnson Space Center in
Houston is managing the CEV program. Karas said the Lockheed jobs would be
spread between the center itself and contractor facilities in the immediate
vicinity.
Lockheed Martin announced
in late February that it would perform final assembly and checkout of the CEV
in Florida, using facilities a Kennedy Space Center that would be improved with
the aid of state
funding. A Lockheed win on CEV would mean 400 to 500 new jobs for Florida,
Karas said in an interview.
About 300 to 400 jobs also would be
created at Lockheed Martin Space Systems' Denver base of operations if the
company wins the CEV competition, Karas said.
Texas, like Florida, has offered
financial incentives to lure the CEV jobs to the state.
Karas declined to quantify the
dollar value of the Texas incentive package, but said they were significant and
would help pay for worker training, infrastructure and facility improvements needed
for the CEV program.
Northrop Grumman so far has not
announced where it would locate its CEV workforce should it win the
competition.
Brooks McKinney, a spokesman for
Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems in El Segundo, Calif., said that the
company has provided its workforce plan to NASA as part of it CEV proposal but
would not be discussing job locations publicly until summer.
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