Fla. space industry prepares for hit

Fla. space industry prepares for hit

The Virginia company chosen to build the new space rocket plans to launch from a Virginia site.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — With space shuttle Endeavour on the launch pad ready for liftoff on Tuesday, and only 11 more scheduled flights before the orbiter fleet retires, Brevard County officials hear the ticking of the clock like a time bomb.

The county is facing thousands of imminent job losses and unexpected hitches in attracting new space business.

The shuttle’s scheduled liftoff from Kennedy Space Center at 2:28 a.m. Tuesday on a construction mission to the international space station only serves as a reminder that the end of an era is fast approaching.

According to Washington insiders, NASA — which until now has refrained from putting numbers on work-force losses — will announce in two weeks that 4,000 jobs will disappear with the shuttle in 2010.

Experts anticipate another few thousand associated jobs will follow suit. NASA will need far fewer workers to operate the shuttle’s planned replacement, the Orion capsule and Ares I rocket, and both are still years away from being ready to take astronauts back to space.

Space advocates say it is unlikely that the new opportunities in commercial space that Florida has been chasing will come close to making up those numbers. Even more worrying: The state is facing increasingly tough competition from other launch sites in the United States and around the globe.

“Space launches are no longer the exclusive purview of the state of Florida,” said Steve Kohler, president of Space Florida, the state’s aerospace development body.

The upshot: After five decades as the world’s most prestigious “Gateway to the Stars,” the Space Coast is losing its luster — and may soon lose its title.

That possibility was driven home last month when NASA awarded a $170-million grant to Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. to build a new rocket to deliver cargo to the space station. But instead of automatically choosing the Cape as its launch base, the company announced it is considering NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

The news was a huge blow to Florida’s assumption’s that all NASA-related launch activity would gravitate to the Cape.

“It was certainly a wake-up call,” said Lynda Weatherman, president of the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast. She compared Florida’s place in the space world to “a 35-year-old woman whose biological clock is running out as suitors look for younger women.”

But Weatherman and county officials are fighting back to make the state more attractive.

In recent weeks, Brevard has hired Wexler Walker, a big Washington lobbying firm, to press Congress for more space opportunities. County officials and space advocates are also hitting Tallahassee hard.