Mass Layoffs at Bigelow Blamed on Commercial Crew Delay

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Doug Messier
on September 30, 2011, at 1:09 pm
in News
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Comments: 10 responses
10 Comments

Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls

Space News reports on a mass layoff at Bigelow Aerospace yesterday:

Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing inflatable space habitats for commercial use, laid off some 40 of its 90 employees Sept. 29, a company official confirmed.

Bigelow Aerospace employees told Space News that the company laid off nearly all of its machinists and that most of the workers retained are associated with the Boeing CCDev effort. Bigelow’s partnership with Boeing on the CST-100 predates Boeing’s 2010 CCDev award.

“We had hoped that by 2014 or 2015 that America would again be able to fly its own astronauts. Unfortunately, the prospect of domestic crew transportation of any kind is apparently going to occur years after the first BA 330 could be ready,” Gold wrote. “For both business and technical reasons, we cannot deploy a BA 330 without a means of transporting crew to and from our station, and the adjustment to our employment levels was necessary to reflect this reality.”

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  • http://globalspin.com Chris Radcliff

    That’s sad news, but completely understandable. I hope Bigelow will be able to restart operations quickly once commercial crew operations start up.

  • http://www.nickolai.me Nickolai_the_Russian_Guy

    Oh no! We need Bigelow!

  • http://www.parabolicarc.com Doug Messier

    It’s sad. If Congress could just find a bit more to spend on commercial crew, NASA would have what it needs and it would be able to kick-start a commercial industry in LEO. They’ve been told that over and over again, but they just don’t listen.

  • http://delphinus100.angelfire.com/link3.htm Frank Glover

    But Congress *has* to give priority to SLS over Commercial Space, because it’s all about creating jobs, and…

    Oh, wait…

  • Greg

    RE: Frank.. You got it fella! This isn’t about jobs, it never was, it’s about the only type of pork politicians know about – votes. They just have to be seen to be concerned about jobs. Doug; I agree, very sad indeed.

  • http://delphinus100.angelfire.com/link3.htm Frank Glover

    Yep. In ‘protecting’ aerospace employment with SLS, they harm that same employment elsewhere, if it sucks away (the relatively small) Commercial Crew funding.

  • warshawski

    A real shame that congress greed in porking SLS that has not long term use has hit an inovative company that has the potential to support a new growing industry. CCDev is the only program with realistic potential to shorten the gap of US human spaceflight and Congres has cut its funding. This loss of jobs and loss of a potential new industry is a result of COngres pork.
    The russians are working on a space tourist habitat and the Chinese have launched the start of a space station so the time is NOW to start comercial spaceflight to get the benifits of early mover not in 5-10 years in an expensive government only craft that no one can afford to use.

  • Paul451

    While everyone blames Congress (and why not), Bigelow has always been vulnerable. They required a competitive commercial crew launch-market and low cost cargo launch to exist before they could sell or lease their private stations. And while they went out of their way to avoid being directly dependent on NASA contracts, they were indirectly counting on NASA (ie, Congress) to accelerate Commercial Crew. Bigelow may have peaked a decade too early.

  • Jim

    After the 2008 economic crash, the underlying business justification for the commercial human space tourism vented like so much air in a vacuum along with the wealth of so many prospective space tourists. Today, the 2004 Futron Space Tourism study looks like a SciFi TV show script. One can no more build-up demand for a service artificially than one can push a string. Yet, with NASA’s CCDev efforts, that is exactly what is being attempted.

  • http://www.parabolicarc.com Doug Messier

    I don’t know, Jim. Boeing seems to think that NASA’s backing closed the business case for them. They’ve been interested in getting into commercial spaceflight since at least the turn of the century. (I believe the Futron study mentioned their interest in a Russian project.) Boeing must have done their own economic analysis on this.