By: Health Insurance
Submitted: 2010-02-02 11:52:58 | Word Count: 845
On the day 420 of its workers were laid off because the space shuttle and Minuteman missile programs are ending, ATK Launch Systems got word that funding for the shuttle's replacement, the Ares missile, has been cut from President Obama's 2011 budget proposal. Ares is part of the Constellation program, designed to take humans back to the moon. Ares is the missile that would carry manned vehicles into space. The motor sections that drive Ares would be built at ATK in Utah.
News reports from Florida and California newspapers and the Associated Press said Constellation will not be included in the 2011 budget that President Obama will send to Congress on Monday.
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The Associated Press reported that NASA will get an additional $5.9 billion over five years, but the money will be used to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2020 and to entice companies to build private spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station after the space shuttle retires.
Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, whose district covers most of ATK's Utah employees, said Thursday that he hasn't seen Obama's budget yet to confirm the story, "but I have seen three very credible sources" that said the same thing.
"With this administration, their specific effort is to cut the crap out of the defense program, and what we're hearing from Florida is that (the NASA cut) will be an item in Monday's budget," Bishop said.
"Obviously, I don't agree this is the right direction. They'll basically be gutting our space program and coming up with a commercial alternative. It will be devastating."
ATK builds solid fuel rocket motors for the space shuttle as well as a wide variety of military missiles. Located 30 miles west of Brigham City, it is one of Utah's largest civilian employers.
The company had 3,900 employees in Utah before the current round of layoffs, announced in December. In addition to 420 on Thursday, it plans to lay off another 300 employees and also laid off 550 last October.
ATK spokesman George Torres said the 420 laid off Thursday was a lower number than originally planned. In December the company said it would cut 500. In addition, 55 of the 420 are leaving voluntarily.
ATK is giving all those laid off a week's pay for every year they worked for ATK, up to 26 weeks, and is holding job fairs. Federal stimulus funds will give each employee $800 a month toward COBRA health insurance costs for 15 months.
Torres declined to speculate how many more employees might be lost if Ares is cut. The motors being built for it have commercial applications, he said, so it is impossible to say what the impact will be.
Torres said Congressional representatives in Texas, Alabama, Florida and Utah are already organizing to fight.
Hearings will be held in Congress beginning in March, and "you'll see in these letters (from congresspeople) I send you, there's folks drawing the line in the sand. One calls it (the cuts) 'bizarre.' "
He was referring to a statement by Rep. Bill Posey, (R-Fla.) who said Obama campaigned in Florida on a promise of maintaining the U.S. lead in outer space.
"The President's U-turn on this issue is both bizarre and misguided," Posey said. "I will continue to work with my House colleagues from both parties and from across the country to keep America first in space. This issue is far from over."
Bishop said that if the money is not in Obama's budget, which would be for the 2011 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, it will be hard to put back because "it requires us to move money," from some other program.
"That will be very difficult to do in this economy."
Bishop castigated the decision, which, if true, he said will mean the end of U.S. supremacy in space.
Funding for NASA got hurt during the final years of the Bush Administration, he said, when congressional deadlock meant budgets were passed by continuing resolutions, not new budgets.
The money was there "but never appropriated, so the increases never got there," he said.
In addition to shuttle motors, he said, Obama wants to cut the missile defense program that has been in development for years. Bishop said he still supports the missile defense program, out of worry about missiles from Korea and from Iran.
If Ares doesn't continue, he said, American astronauts will have to depend on rides in Russian and Chinese capsules to get to the International Space Station.
"Seven thousand jobs nationwide depend on this particular program," he said. "Jobs are important. We're not getting there this way."
