When the Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down today some 3,200 workers at NASA contractors waved goodbye to an icon of American technology, and to their jobs.
Another 12,000 jobs had already gone in the run-up to the end of the 30-year programme, which at its peak in 1992 employed about 30,000 people, inside and outside NASA.
All that will be left are about 3,500 civil service jobs that have depended on the Shuttle.
Especially hard-hit are people at Houston-headquartered United Space Alliance, NASA's prime human spaceflight contractor, which needed 750,000 man hours to prepare an orbiter, external fuel tank and two solid boosters for each flight. USA is to lay off 2,600-2,800 people in Florida, Texas and Alabama - more than half its 5,600 headcount.
Boeing's Space Exploration division is laying-off 510 people, mostly owing to the end of the Shuttle programme. Hitting hard in Florida, an estimated 2,000 Kennedy Space Center workers will go with Shuttle.
There is clearly anger, and not a little despair, connected with this rolling back of America's space programme. As Representative Sandy Adams, whose Congressional district encompasses Cape Canaveral, puts it: "I want families in Florida to know that I share the anger of so many of you directed at this Administration and NASA for failing to prepare our community for this painstaking transition. NASA's human spaceflight programme is not just about space exploration, but it's a symbol of strength for our country.
"At a time when governments like China are gearing up for the next big explosion in space industry and technologies, it is painfully clear that preserving this workforce is not just about ensuring people have jobs - it is about the national security interests of our nation."
Marion Blakey, chief executive of the Aerospace Industries Association trade organisation since 2007 and former head of the Federal Aviation Administration, is also uncomfortable with the government's failure, so far, to spell out a vision for America in space.
"Those who wring their hands at the landing of Atlantis as the death knell of our space programme are off-base," she says, but adds that the longer term strategy needs to be clarified.
What alarms Blakey is that, beyond NASA's push to work with private-sector contractors to develop low Earth-orbit transportation capabilities to replace the Shuttle's International Space Station missions, there is no plan for deeper space exploration that industry can use as a guide to research and investment.
Vehicles, she notes, are building blocks, not ambitions.
Meanwhile, there has been "some migration" of people from Shuttle-related jobs to private-sector space transportation projects but she says too many jobs - and the expertise that goes with them - may be lost completely. "This is incredible intellectual capital we're talking about."
Blakey is also concerned that unless NASA is given a clear vision for space exploration beyond maintenance of low Earth-orbit activity, there is little hope of inspiring a new generation of young people to follow careers in science and engineering, the way their parents were inspired by the Apollo and Shuttle programmes.
Vague talk of visiting an asteroid, or even Mars, is not good enough, she says.
Real decisions need to be taken, soon, and vision must not be sacrificed to the current economic environment.
A half a percent or so of the federal budget, says Blakey, is little money compared with the huge benefit that would come from maintaining an inspirational space programme.
The alternative, she says, is to create an unbridgeable deficit of capability. "It's possible to lose your industrial base in a way that can't be overcome."
Source: Flight International
