NASA plans to eliminate 900 manufacturing jobs

NASA has announced plans to cut 900 manufacturing jobs as it prepares to retire its space shuttle fleet next year.The layoffs will be between now and the end of September.

The job losses come as NASA plans to retire its space shuttle fleet in September 2010.The three shuttles have just nine more flights to go between them before their retirement. According to NASA officials, The first 160 layoff notices will go out on Friday. Majority of the job cuts will be among the contractors producing the space shuttle fuel tanks outside New Orleans and the shuttle solid rocket boosters in Utah.

Announcing the plans on Thursday, shuttle Program Manager John Shannon said:

We have delivered the last pieces of hardware that those team members produce and we don't keep them on the (payroll). And that is in order to get our budget down to the marks and the assumptions we made early on. So we will start tomorrow and continue with the workforce reduction we had outlined.

NASA's workforce has come down significantly from a high of 24,000 in the nineties to about 13,800 now. More job losses are expected as NASA plans to replace the shuttles with Apollo-style capsules.

Some manufacturing jobs are expected to be created to build the shuttle's replacement, new capsule spaceships, named Orion.Money for developing Orion and its launcher, called Ares, is coming from funds that previously went toward shuttle operations and station construction. Orion is expected to make its debut by 2015.