HOUSTON — NASA’s long-running shuttle program will transition quickly into a two-year final retirement phase – marked by thousands of reassignments of federal civil servants and contractor layoffs – once Atlantis touches down at the conclusion of the 12-day STS-135 supply mission to the International Space Station.
“The program will end 30 days after wheel stop,” NASA Space Shuttle Program Manager John Shannon told a June 30 news briefing.
Atlantis is expected to return to Kennedy Space Center on July 20 — if the orbiter and its crew of four astronauts lift off on July 8 at 11:26 a.m. EDT as scheduled.
Shannon counts a 5,500-person contractor workforce and 1,200 federal employees, most of them stretching from Utah to Texas, Louisiana and Florida, as the STS-135 countdown nears a July 5 start. Shuttle retirement activities, which began three years ago, have claimed orbiters Endeavour and Discovery, which concluded their final flights on June 1 and March 9.
The workforce will fall by 3,200 personnel, most of them at Kennedy, within days of Atlantis’s anticipated Florida homecoming. By late August, the combined shuttle workforce will drop to 1,000 as the orbiter’s initial de-servicing is completed, Shannon says.
Over the next two years, the numbers will continue to decline as NASA dispositions shuttle hardware. The dwindling retirement team will start with shuttle equipment at NASA installations and finish with property at off-site facilities, according to the program manager.
The program counted 16,000 contractors and 1,800 government personnel during the early phase of space station assembly a decade ago.
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