NASA’s new frontier poses daunting tasks

With only three years remaining before the space shuttle fleet’s planned retirement, NASA managers have begun tackling the thorny issues that will dictate the program’s end.

Critical facilities must be overhauled to support planned manned missions to the moon. Billions of dollars’ worth of obsolete shuttle hardware must be disposed of. And, most difficult of all, thousands of jobs must be shifted or eliminated as the shuttle era ends and the new Constellation project takes off, with manned lunar missions starting as early as 2015.

“Because it touches so many buildings and pieces of equipment and -- most important of all -- people, it requires a lot of technical management and attention every day,” said Joel Kearns, transition manager for NASA’s space-operations division in Washington.

Nowhere will the changes be felt more keenly than at Kennedy Space Center, which will see a transformation of its work force, facilities and operations. The changes also will affect at least three other NASA field centers that play a major role in manned space missions: Johnson Space Center in Houston; Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.; and Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss. Today, there are about 13,000 full-time workers at Kennedy, consisting of roughly 11,000 contractors and 2,000 government employees. Most of them work on the shuttle.

One of NASA’s biggest challenges is to avoid an early exodus of employees with crucial skills as the program winds down.

Though NASA wants to retain workers with essential skills, many abilities required in today’s shuttle program will not be needed to prepare the Constellation program’s near-term Orion spacecraft for flight.

NASA and its shuttle contractors plan to retrain as many workers as possible and move them into new jobs. But it’s clear that a significantly smaller work force will be employed in ground operations and spacecraft processing for the new program.

The initial target was to shrink Constellation’s budget for operations and sustaining engineering to 60% of what it cost the shuttle program in 2007. NASA and its shuttle contractors have crunched the workforce numbers, but the final totals haven’t been decided on. Some estimates have projected that a third of Kennedy’s workers could be affected.

Another personnel challenge will be managing the gap between the shuttle and Constellation programs. Many workers were displaced and their skills were lost between the final Apollo flight in July 1975 and the first shuttle mission in April 1981. NASA wants to avoid a repeat.

The expected gap between the shuttle’s planned retirement in September 2010 and Constellation’s first manned lunar launch targeted for March 2015 has ballooned to more than four years because of funding shortfalls in Congress. NASA hopes to keep workers busy during the gap with ground and flight tests of the new Orion capsule and Ares rocket systems.

The astronaut corps at Johnson will be affected as well. There are two types of astronauts: military personnel on assignment from their branches of the armed services and civil servants employed by NASA. Both groups could shrink. As the shuttle nears retirement, the number of civil-servant astronauts is projected to drop from 99 in 2009 to 74 in 2011.