Space Shuttle
Recession casts doubt over KSC job loss
Florida Today
The retirement of NASA’s shuttles could prompt thousands more job losses than once expected because of a national recession and concerns about ongoing changes to the new moon program.
An unreleased local government study is expected to estimate a net loss of as many as 6,000 to 7,000 jobs after 2010 at Kennedy Space Center, said Lisa Rice, president of the Brevard Workforce Development Board Inc.
Two earlier versions of the same study, completed in 2007 and 2008, indicated that the area would lose about 3,500 space jobs in the transition from the shuttle to a replacement fleet of rockets and spaceships.
NASA’s latest public estimate placed job losses between 3,000 and 4,000.
The local work force agency’s studies are based in part on data provided by NASA and its contractors, as well as independent economic analyzes.
Read the full story.
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Appalling, and where are all the highly qualified US engineers going, Britain, Japan, Brazil, Russia, China? The wholesale dismemberment of the US space engineering community has to stop. There is perhaps no genuine reason to retire the shuttle, which can most probably be readily upgraded and kept running for the long term duration of the ISS through the opening up of the program into an international subscription.
Even given the need for a newer version of an original, proven and highly productive vehicle, why not look to build a replacement shuttle within cooperative international and commercial venture. What is the actual and pressing need to dismantle or break down any part of the shuttle vehicles, facilities or the shuttle work force?
Have we taken up an insufficient policy perspective that does not address the truly unique value of such an asset, does not take into account the huge loss of expertise and ability that will result and does not take into consideration the potential for dramatically lowering running costs through international investment into the maintenance and duration of an irreplaceable shuttle based space development resource.
These remarkable vehicles might be included as continuing partners for various space agency locations around the world. Taking off and landing in many qualified host countries. Placing and defining many levels within ongoing LEO utilities.
The shuttle fleet can surely continue to fully demonstrate US partnership, scientific and cultural alliances, good will and global inspiration, why make redundant what is a most important and useful US national asset and face the possibility of the incidental export of highly trained engineering manifests to the highest bidder.
Is the US space program so far in advance of the rest of the world that the only way it can fully justify or perpetuate itself is by causally jettisoning the older models, or is this built in “redundancy” a way of ensuring narrow range interests whose advanced ideals are more intended for partial, incidental, and short term manufacture and design contracts than anything else?