Rockwell to Eliminate 1,800 Southland Jobs : Phasing Out of Space Shuttle Work Cited; Firm May Rehire Half for Other Projects

Rockwell International will eliminate 1,800 jobs at two of its Los Angeles area spacecraft plants in coming months--and an undetermined number of additional jobs later in the year--as its 18-year-old role as builder of the space shuttle winds down.

The aerospace firm is trimming 1,400 jobs at its Palmdale space shuttle assembly site and about 400 jobs at its Downey fabrication and engineering plant, Rockwell officials said Tuesday in an interview.

As many as half of those workers, however, will be rehired by other Rockwell divisions in the area that have expanding programs, including the B-1B bomber and the space station units, said Rocco A. Petrone, president of Rockwell’s space transportation systems division.

Rockwell, the nation’s second-largest defense contractor, employs 44,600 workers in Southern California.

The cutbacks affect some of the aerospace industry’s most highly skilled technicians, assemblers and inspectors. The 900 workers who will be laid off face good employment prospects with Lockheed, Northrop and other Los Angeles area aerospace firms that are aggressively expanding, Petrone said.

The cutbacks at the Palmdale plant, which have been going on for several weeks, will reduce employment there to only 100 workers by mid-July.

Rockwell has been ordered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to put into storage the tooling used to build the orbiters.

Rockwell’s sprawling Downey factory employs 7,300. The cutbacks of about 400 workers there will start later this month and affect a broad cross-section of workers.

The large remaining work force supports the operation of the four space shuttles, including managing a $1.5-billion spare parts program, planning space shuttle flights and designing flight hardware for special missions.

Many of those jobs are considered by NASA to be essential to the operation of the shuttle fleet, but cutbacks are looming later this year.

Arnold Aldrich, a top NASA manager who negotiates directly with Rockwell, said that sharp pressure on the NASA budget for fiscal 1986 will reduce funding for operations at the Downey plant. The Reagan Administration requested $7.88 billion for NASA in fiscal 1986, but the House voted recently to trim the request by $375 million. The ax is likely to fall heavily on the shuttle program.

Aldrich said that NASA is still studying how to allocate the cutbacks among its various programs, but the reductions are likely to be felt at Downey. Aldrich said that funding cutbacks to Rockwell could generate “several hundred” additional layoffs.

Rockwell, which received its first space shuttle study contract in 1968 and began production in 1973, delivered the last of four planned orbiters April 1.

Rockwell has long hoped that NASA would elect to build two more orbiters and has argued against dismantling the capability to produce them.

The political outlook, however, for the continued production of space shuttles has dimmed over the past year, foreshadowing the current layoffs.

Rockwell’s hope for additional orbiter production, however, is being kept alive in orders for so-called structural spare parts, part of a $420-million program.

Those spares include a spare fuselage, wings, tail, cargo doors and other parts. The fabrication of such parts is unprecedented in aerospace, since it is inconceivable to many experts that a fuselage could ever be replaced. NASA designed the program to keep production lines going in case additional orbiters were needed.

But NASA Administrator James Beggs testified earlier this year that the agency sees no need for an additional orbiter “in the foreseeable future.”