Bracing for More Bad News in Florida
TITUSVILLE, Fla. -- In this waterfront town of mom-and-pop stores and single-family homes that styles itself the bedroom suburb of the Kennedy Space Center, people know firsthand how precarious it is to tie one’s livelihood to the conquest of space. Like Americans everywhere, they grieve the loss of Columbia. But they also wonder whether they will lose their jobs.
“At the end of the Apollo program, this place was a ghost town,” said real estate agent Carl DeForest.
His office on U.S. 1 looks eastward across the Indian River lagoon to the launch pads on Cape Canaveral where Americans once blasted off for the moon, and where Columbia’s doomed mission originated. “With $100 down and take over the mortgage, you could pretty much pick up any home in town then,” DeForest said.
The decision to build and fly the space shuttle brought flush times back to this place on Florida’s Atlantic seaboard, and heady dreams that what had been orange groves and sleepy fishing settlements would mushroom to become a “miracle” Space Age metropolis of 100,000 residents.
That vision perished in the 1986 Challenger explosion.
When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration put the shuttle program on hold for nearly three years, thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians and other employees were terminated by NASA or its contractors, and had to move away.
“Titusville has been boom and bust, depending on the whims of government agencies and funding,” said Laurilee Thompson, manager of the Dixie Crossroads, a 425-seat seafood restaurant that specializes in rock shrimp, a locally caught delicacy. “When the funding is good for the space program, life is good here.”
Now the Florida municipality of 42,000, like other American communities closely tied to NASA and the aerospace industry, is anxiously bracing for what will happen next.
More than 5,000 people in Titusville and its environs work for NASA and associated contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and United Space Alliance. Walt Johnson, executive director of the Space Coast Economic Development Commission, said he was being barraged with phone calls from worried merchants and business leaders.
“My crystal ball is a little foggy right now, but I’m trying to give them some confidence,” Johnson said. “The message we need to send out is that we’re not closing down, and Kennedy Space Center is not closing down.”
A more diversified economy, fast-increasing cruise ship traffic at Port Canaveral, growing eco-tourism linked to a nearby national seashore and wildlife refuge and encroaching urban sprawl from the Orlando area all give residents hope that if an economic trough is coming, it will be nothing like the long and painful downturns of the past.
Also grounds for optimism is the fact that the international space station is in orbit, requiring periodic resupply and crew changes.
“I don’t think the slowdown or grounding of the fleet will last as long” as it did after the Challenger accident, said Marcia Gaedcke, president of the Titusville Area Chamber of Commerce. “We weren’t putting people on a space station 17 years ago, or working with other countries. I think that makes a difference.”
The Houston area, home to Johnson Space Center and already suffering from a recession, has the same mix of concern and optimism.
There, NASA and its affiliates contribute nearly $2 billion a year to the local economy, and more than 16,500 people work on projects associated with the space center.
The shuttle program’s shutdown after Challenger coincided with a drop in oil prices and did great damage to the Houston area’s economy, particularly in communities that surround and rely on the Johnson center, such as Clear Lake and Webster. Many enterprises, including contractors and research institutes affiliated with local universities, suffered then.
“It would have a huge impact on everybody here” if the present slowdown at Johnson Space Center continues, said Deanna Eaton, 52, of Webster. “It’s about jobs, it’s about livelihoods. Nobody wants to see the space program cut.”
Space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore pledged to relaunch work at the Johnson center as early as this week.
Like much smaller Titusville, however, Houston is no longer the same city.
Johnson Space Center was once in a remote area, but metropolitan sprawl has effectively folded the region in as a suburb, and oil engineers and energy workers now live in new, upper-middle-class developments alongside members of the space community. While space remains the most visible industry in the communities south of Houston, the region, like Titusville, has intentionally diversified, expanding into new areas of industry, such as chemical refineries, and new areas of tourism, such as yachting.
A quarter of a century ago, fears about the future of the space program led business leaders around Johnson Space Center to take steps to make the economy more broad-based, said Claudette Alderman, president of the Clear Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. Other business leaders said Monday that the Challenger explosion gave those efforts added urgency.
These days, Alderman said, the space program supports just 17% of the region’s jobs, down from 70% in 1986. What’s more, she said, the space center primarily represents the research and development arm of NASA, not manufacturing operations, which are often farmed out to contractors across the country. So the temporary grounding of the remaining three space shuttles and the investigation into the Columbia accident is likely to mean that employees will be performing new tasks in coming months, not given pink slips.
Kennedy Space Center and its associated contractors have been spending almost $2 billion a year in Florida, and their operations account for at least 1 job in every 12 in Titusville and the neighboring cities of Brevard County, said Dave Lenze, an economist with the University of Florida’s bureau of economic and business research.
Historically, Lenze said, the business of space exploration has behaved like another industry notoriously prone to mass layoffs -- automaking. “It hurts in the down cycle, but the good thing is that these are high-paying jobs,” he said. The end of the Apollo program caused a full-blown recession and three consecutive years of increasing unemployment in Brevard County. The Challenger accident stopped growth cold.
On Monday, speaking at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., President Bush pledged to return American astronauts to space as quickly as possible.
For the 1,500 NASA civil servants and 12,500 employees of private contractors working at the launch complex on Cape Canaveral, those were very welcome words.
For the present, said NASA program analyst Pedro Carrion, a 12-year veteran of the shuttle program, the work force at Kennedy Space Center is busy with routine tasks, including testing modules to be ferried to the space station and maintenance of Columbia’s sister orbiters.
“I don’t foresee anything happening, really,” Carrion said when asked if there might be massive layoffs. “Of course, until something comes from Congress or Mr. O’Keefe [NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe], we won’t know. But I expect we’ll go through this, find the problem, and whatever the anomaly is, fix it, and quickly.”
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Dahlburg reported from Titusville, Gold from Houston.
