Kennedy Space Center Laying Off 1,100

Gearing down for at least a year’s delay in the space shuttle program, NASA issued the first of 1,100 layoff notices here Friday but pledged to keep its work force in a “strong posture” to resume space flights.

The layoffs, the largest NASA staff cutbacks since the end of the Apollo program more than a decade ago, affect 7% of the 16,000-member team that assembles the space shuttle and launches it into orbit.

Space Center ‘Readjustments’

They are the first in what NASA officials said will be “certain readjustments” at space centers throughout the nation in the wake of the Jan. 28 explosion that destroyed the shuttle Challenger and its seven-member crew.

The $44-million payroll cutback at Cape Canaveral is across the board, affecting technicians, engineers, inspectors and office personnel. But the space agency is seeking to keep a broad spectrum of workers “beneficially employed” in preparation for future launchings, Thomas Utsman, deputy director of the Kennedy Space Center, said.

“The message is (that) we’ve got a lot to do to get prepared to start up again, and we’ve got to get on with that,” he said.

About 650 of the staff reductions would have occurred even without the Challenger accident, as a result of launching pad improvements made over the last several years.

Hold on Launchings

The other 450 are in direct response to an expected one-year hold on shuttle launchings while investigators assess what happened to Challenger.

Over the next several months, the focus will be on upgrading the three remaining orbiters and preparing to deliver one of them to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California before the end of the year, shuttle operations director Robert Sieck said.

The staffing level envisioned over the next 12 months is designed to provide enough work to “keep the crew very sharp,” while allowing NASA to review the training for and procedures used in the Challenger launching, agency officials said.

The staff cutbacks, to take effect between now and late May, affect four of the major contractors that perform the day-to-day work on the space shuttle: Lockheed Space Operations Co., the primary contractor for assembly and launching, 660 jobs; McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Co., which assists in processing shuttle payloads, 90 to 104 positions; Planning Research Corp., 150 jobs, and Boeing Aerospace Operations, 200 jobs.

At the conclusion of the Apollo program in the early 1970s, the Kennedy work force was reduced to 8,400 from 26,000 before it was boosted again by the space shuttle program.

The Kennedy layoffs follow an announcement last month by Morton Thiokol Inc., producer of the shuttle’s solid rocket booster, that it is laying off 200 full-time employees and placing 1,400 others on four-day workweeks.

There was no indication of immediate layoffs at the Johnson Space Center in Houston or the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Meanwhile, Navy officials announced that they will attempt today to recover a 4,200-pound segment of the shuttle’s left rocket booster from about 210 feet of water off the coast of Cape Canaveral.

Testing Salvage Tools

Recovery of the badly damaged booster segment will allow salvagers to test their tools before attempting the more difficult--and more sensitive--recovery of sections of the right booster, 1,200 feet below the surface, Air Force salvage director Edward O’Connor said.

So far, the critical aft joint segment on the right booster, which is thought to have sprung a fatal leak of flaming gases, has not been found, although divers have tracked a debris field several hundred meters long where it is believed to have landed.