State Shuttle Site to Be Closed Till 1990s

The Air Force will “mothball” the space shuttle complex here until the 1990s, a move that will save the government about $60 million but result in 1,000 layoffs almost immediately, the base commander announced Friday.

The 1,000 Lockheed Space Operations Co. workers originally were to have been laid off next June. In addition, according to Maj. Gen. Donald Aldridge, 400 Martin Marietta Aerospace employees will be laid off next spring--several months earlier than previously announced.

Tests that now have been postponed were to have consisted of bringing the shuttle Columbia to Vandenberg and placing it on the pad with fuel tank and solid rocket boosters attached.

The decision to delay the tests and “mothball” the $3.3-billion shuttle facility was made as the House and Senate in Washington sliced millions in shuttle funding out of the military appropriations bill, said John Doherty, an aide to U.S. Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ojai).

Upkeep Funds Deleted

The funding that would have been used to “keep up” the shuttle facility until next year “in essence was taken out,” Doherty said.

The budget savings of putting the facility in caretaker status were estimated in July at $200 million a year.

After the Jan. 28 Challenger disaster, a shuttle launching at Vandenberg that had been scheduled for 1986 was delayed to 1992.

Both Lockheed, the shuttle ground servicing contractor, and Martin Marietta, chief designer and installer of ground systems, have been laying off shuttle workers since January, when the program had its peak of 4,300 civilian employees. Last week the number had been reduced to 2,100 workers.

Lockheed is attempting to transfer some of the employees who will be laid off to other sites where the company has contracts, said G.T. Oppliger, a vice president of the company. Both Lockheed and Marietta will build up their work force again at Vandenberg up to two years before the next scheduled launching.

‘Sooner Than Expected’

“We knew we were going to have layoffs--they’ve just come sooner than we expected,” Doherty said. “Obviously that many layoffs is going to be a blow to Lompoc.”

But Ed Penna, a Lompoc official, said the loss of jobs won’t “significantly impact” the economy. About half of the 1,000 workers who will be laid off live in other areas of Santa Barbara County, he said.

“We’ve gone through ups and downs at the base for decades,” he said. “And some of those people will be able to pick up jobs in the area and be able to stay; not all of them were high-tech workers.”

But, Penna acknowledged, some merchants will suffer. Developers in Lompoc have increased the number of hotel and motel rooms almost fivefold since 1980 in anticipation of a tourist boom associated with a space shuttle launching.