NASA on
Friday began the first wave of layoffs that will ultimately eliminate 900 jobs
by September as the space agency resumes plans to retire its space
shuttle fleet next year.
The space
agency issued 160 layoff notices today for manufacturing jobs that are no
longer required to support the last eight missions slated to launch between now
and the December 2010 deadline to mothball NASA's three
aging space shuttles.
"This is
the first significant loss of manufacturing capability," John Shannon, NASA's
shuttle program manager, told reporters late Thursday.
The layoffs
are primarily focused in Utah and New Orleans, where contractors build the twin
solid rocket boosters and 15-story external tanks that help boost
NASA shuttles into space. They came one day after the expiration of a
temporary hold enacted by Congress to delay the shuttle program shutdown until
April 30 so President Barack Obama's administration had time to weigh in.
Now that
the deadline has passed, NASA will resume shutting down shuttle manufacturing
operations that are no longer needed for the remaining flights. NASA plans to
launch the space shuttle Atlantis on May 11 to perform one final service call
on the Hubble Space Telescope. Seven other missions are scheduled to complete
construction of the International Space Station.
Last month,
President Obama released a budget outline that could
allow one extra flight to the space station to deliver a billion-dollar
experiment - the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer - but only if the mission would
fit within NASA's 2010 retirement plan.
"I love the
shuttle. I have spent my career working on the shuttle," Shannon said. "At some
time you have to decide that what the shuttle was meant to do has been done.
And I would say that it has."
The space
shuttle is the only reusable spacecraft capable of launching astronauts on space
service calls like the Hubble repair mission or carrying massive construction
pieces to the International Space Station.
Not all of
the 900 eliminated shuttle positions are layoffs, Shannon said. Some include
attrition as employees leave the workforce, while others include reassignment
to other projects, such as NASA's Constellation program that is building its
space shuttle successor.
NASA will
shift the funding saved from the shuttle's retirement over to the development
of that new spaceship – the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle – which is
expected to make its operational debut no earlier than March 2015.
Orion is a
capsule-based spacecraft that builds on the legacy of NASA's Apollo-era vehicles.
The new vehicle will be launched on a shuttle-derived Ares I rocket to ferry
new crews to the International Space Station. It is also slated to return
astronauts to the moon by 2020.
Orion was
initially slated to come in two versions: a six-seater for space station
crew flights, and a four-seater for moon missions. NASA confirmed this week
that it is focusing on the four-person Orion for now, which should save time,
money and keep the spacecraft on track for a 2015 target.
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