Contractor Employees At Risk; Some Will Shift To Other Jobs In Their Companies

The beginning of the end has arrived for workers in the space shuttle program, with 160 workers laid off last week, and hundreds more being dumped out of the program over the next year or more.

Some of them, perhaps the lucky ones, will move to other contractor jobs. And some were planning to leave anyway.

That was the message from senior NASA officials, responding to a question during a news conference at Kennedy Space Center, after a flight readiness review for the impending May 11 liftoff of Space Shuttle Atlantis on the STS-125 Mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope.

Beginning with the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, 2010, NASA will lose the ability to transport even a single astronaut to space for half a decade, until the next- generation spaceship system lifts off in 2015 on its first manned mission. Meanwhile, the United States will depend on the Russians to take American astronauts to space on Soyuz vehicles. Even former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin described the situation as "unseemly."

In the briefing last week, John Shannon, space shuttle program manager, described those leaving their posts.

"They are primarily manufacturing team members," he said. "We have delivered the last pieces of hardware that those team members produced, and we don’t keep them on the" payroll any longer than needed, not out of insensitivity, but out of necessity. "That is to get our budget down to the marks and the assumptions that we have made early on. So we will start [the layoffs] and continue with the workforce reduction that we had outlined."

Those leaving their jobs will be contractor employees, not NASA workers, he said.

"All of those numbers were in the contractor workforce, or contractor team members," he explained. "They are not all layoffs. It will reduce by 900 positions that shuttle program pays. Our anticipation is that about 400 of them will be layoffs. About 350 will be attrition, folks that were going to leave anyway. And then there will be some badge changes of folks moving from one contract to the next."

Luckily for some workers losing jobs as the space shuttle program winds down, at least some limited new employment opportunities are opening, according to Bill Gerstenmaier, associate NASA administrator for space operations.

"We’ll see some new contract work coming on line, available for some of our workforce," Gerstenmaier said. That would be in the Constellation Program now developing the next- generation Orion spacecraft and the Ares I rocket to boost it to space, and the Ares V heavy lift rocket and the Altair moon lander.

Work will become available as well "in engineering processing operations," Gerstenmaier said.

Shannon explained that it is unsurprising that some job openings would become available on contractor payrolls. "You have to remember that most of our big contractors have a pretty broad business base, and they try to retain their really good people and move them to other areas," he said. In fact, contractors, NASA, the Department of Defense and others are facing tough times in finding people with engineering, math and science degrees, who have extensive experience in designing and producing space and defense hardware, and who also possess required security clearances. (There is a perpetual backlog of about 280,000 people seeking security clearances.)

People losing those contractor jobs tend to be centered in Louisiana, where thousands lost jobs in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and in Utah.

"If you think about it," Shannon said, "the production areas are at the Michoud Facility in New Orleans and ATK out in Utah.

While NASA needs to ensure that unessential contractor personnel are laid off from the shuttle program payrolls, so as to free money for the Constellation Program, some layoffs will be delayed for more than a year, Shannon indicated.

"We will hold operations teams — the folks that put the hardware together, do the testing, do the launch, do the operations, do the vehicle turnaround — fairly high throughout fiscal year 2010, until we’ve flown our last flight, and then there’ll be a fairly steep drop … in the manufacturing areas," he said. That will include personnel at both prime contractors and vendors, he added.

The workforce reduction at this time doesn’t include Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne employees, briefers said. Pratt is a unit of United Technologies Corp. [UTX].

As to just which companies will shed workers, Shannon said that the briefers would "like to be a little bit vague," because "not all of the companies have notified their employees" that they are being let go.

NASA is turning out some subcontractors, Gerstenmaier said, but "we keep the engineering staff around" to trouble-shoot any problems that arise.

"This is the first significant" loss of personnel impelled by the looming space shuttle fleet retirement, Shannon said.