United Space Alliance about to reach end of KSC mission
Once one of Brevard County’s largest employers, United Space Alliance will be down to a couple hundred employees after nearly 600 are laid off this week.
The joint venture that brought rivals Lockheed Martin Corp. andRockwell International Corp. together in 1996 as lead operator of the U.S. space-shuttle fleet is, 17 years later, almost finished winding down at Kennedy Space Center. The Houston-based company, which supported nearly 60 shuttle missions, plans to let go 559 KSC people Friday, followed by another 77 on April 5.
That will leave about 140 employees at Kennedy for an operation that for years boasted as many as 6,600 engineers, technicians and administrative personnel at the space center, out of 10,500 nationwide. The layoffs bring to an end a shuttle-related downsizing that began in 2009.
Parent companies Lockheed Martin and the Boeing Co., which acquired Rockwell International’s 50 percent stake in the joint venture the same year it was created, have been quiet about USA’s future. But it is widely considered just a matter of time before the venture ceases daily operations.
“I can’t imagine how it stays viable much longer,” said Mike McCulley, a former shuttle pilot whowas Lockheed’s KSCsite director in the 1990s and USA’s chief executive from 2003-07.
The company will still have about 800 people in Houston, mostly supporting operations of the International Space Station. But the few staffers remaining in Brevard County will handle only contract closeouts.
Not all of the employees leaving this week are out of a job; some will join Jacobs Technology, which won a KSC ground-operations contract that starts Friday.
USA represented a major shift in the way NASA ran the nation’s shuttle program. Shuttle operations had for years been dispersed across 86 contracts held by 56 companies, with the two biggest held by Lockheed at Kennedy and Rockwell at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
ButWashingtonwassoonopento consolidation. In the early ’90s, the Clinton-Gore White House pushed to “reinvent” a moreefficient federal government, and NASAAdministrator Dan Goldin’s “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy sought to cut costs. A 1995 report by Chris Kraft, a legendary NASA flight director and JSC director, backedtheidea of turningshuttleoperations over to a single, prime contractor.
Lockheed and Rockwell decided to team up, and formed United Space Alliance to bid for the new Space Flight Operations Contract. NASA convinced Congress it was a good idea to award the contract without competition. When the deal was signed in September 1996, Kent Black, who became USA’s first chief executive, said it marked a “revolutionary change in how NASA manages major programs.”
The contract offered incentives to reduce costs without sacrificing safety.
“It was an earthquake within NASA,” said Jim Adamson, a former astronaut and USA’s first chief operating officer. “The culture shock shook NASA to its core. Many managers resisted the change for fear of losing operational control of their ‘baby.’ Fortunately, USA also had champions at the top levels of NASA.”
Others saw the transition as less significant. Many of the original 9,400 employees simply kept doing their jobs, just for a different company.
“It was outsourcing to a new entity work previously outsourced to elements of that entity under different names, so it wasn’t all that momentous,” space-policy expert John Logsdon said.