From CBS News:
Space workers still struggle a year after space shuttle mission ended
(CBS/AP) How do you find a new job when your only work experience is
building and maintaining a space shuttle? That is a question many are
having to grapple with a year after the United States ended its
three-decade long space shuttle mission. Over 7,400 people are out of
work and most are still looking for jobs.
Some have
headed to South Carolina to build airplanes in that state's growing
industry, and others have moved as far as Afghanistan to work as
government contractors. Some found lower-paying jobs beneath their
technical skills that allowed them to stay. Many are still looking for
work and cutting back on things like driving and utilities to save
money.
"Nobody wants to hire the old guy," said Terry
White, a 62-year-old former project manager who worked 33 years for the
shuttle program until he was laid off after Atlantis landed last July
21. "There just isn't a lot of work around here. Or if so, the wages are
really small."
White earned more than $100,000 a year at the end of his career at
the space center. The prospects of finding a job that pays anywhere near
that along the Space Coast are slim.
"I could take an $11-an-hour job that is 40 miles away," he said "But with gas prices and all that, it's not really worthwhile."
While
other shuttle workers in Houston, New Orleans and Huntsville, Alabama,
lost jobs, those areas had bigger economies to absorb the workers. In
less economically diverse Brevard County, the mainly contractor
positions cut by NASA accounted for just under 5 percent of the county's
private sector jobs.
"It was the experience and job of a lifetime,"
crane operator Lou Hanna told Scott Pelley on "60 Minutes" in April.
"I was working with Pad one day, with a friend of mine. And he's a
crane operator too. And I ask him, I said, 'How many other crane
operators do you suppose that there are doing what we're doing? There's
two, you and me.'"
The Kennedy Space Center's current workforce of
8,500 workers is the smallest in more in than 35 years. In the middle
of the last decade, the space center employed around 15,000 workers.
James
Peek, a 48-year-old quality inspector for the shuttles, has applied for
50 positions with no success since he was laid off in October 2010. He
has taken odd jobs glazing windows for a luxury hotel in Orlando and
working as a security guard. He has no health insurance and incurred a
$13,000 bill when he was hospitalized for three days last May.
"With most companies, it's like your application goes into a black hole," Peek said. "We're struggling to stay afloat."
Jobless
space workers have signed up for Brevard Workforce's job placement and
training services. Slightly more than half of the 5,700 workers the
agency has been able to track have found jobs, but more than a quarter
of those positions were outside Florida. Those jobs have been in the
fields of engineering, mechanics and security, according to the agency.
Brevard
County's unemployment rate spiked in the months that the shuttle
program wound down, going from 10.6 percent in April 2011 to 11.7
percent in August 2011. It has since declined to 9 percent, a result of a
smaller workforce as many former shuttle workers either moved away or
retired earlier than planned. Brevard County has added 2,700 jobs since
the beginning of the year, but many are in the southern part of the
72-mile (116-kilometer)-long county where information technology giant
Harris Corp. and airplane-maker Embraer are located. Jobless space
workers in the northern part of the county jokingly refer to those
high-tech workers as "their rich cousins."
Some local employers are finding that the former space workers' salary demands are sometimes too high.
"STOP
sending former Space Center employees," one employer wrote to Brevard
Workforce, the local job agency, in a comment included in its monthly
committee report. "They have an unrealistic salary expectation."
Taxpayer
money allocated for job training programs for displaced space shuttle
workers also is dwindling a year after the program ended.
Adding
to the difficulties of finding a new job is the age of many of the
former shuttle workers. Many spent their entire careers working on the
space shuttles and are now in their 50s and 60s.
In
between sending out resumes and meeting at networking events, many of
the space workers are volunteering at Kennedy Space Center, giving tours
to dignitaries and providing oral histories to tourists who stop by the
Vehicle Assembly Building.
Even though many of the
older space workers like White had years to plan for the end of the
shuttle program, they stuck around, hoping to prepare the orbiters for
displays in museums in Florida, Los Angeles and Washington after the
program ended. They expected younger shuttle workers to move over to the
successor Constellation program whose goal was to send astronauts to
the moon and then Mars. But the cancellation of the Constellation
program in 2010 increased the competition for those few jobs left
prepping the shuttles.
Some shuttle workers, such as
Kevin Harrington, had been holding out hope that the program announced
after Constellation's demise - a heavy-lift rocket system that would
launch astronauts in an Orion space capsule - would offer immediate
widespread job opportunities. But the plans announced last year won't
have unmanned test launches of the Space Launch System for another five
years, and the first manned mission won't be for about another decade.
Private-sector
companies, such as Paypal founder Elon Musk's Space X, are starting
unmanned launches from Kennedy Space Center, but their need for workers
doesn't come close to what was required for the shuttle program.
"We
expected a little more action from our government, at least in figuring
out what direction we're going to go in," said Harrington, 55, who
worked on the shuttles' thermal protection system earning about $80,000 a
year. "Ultimately, that would inform which direction we would go in. A
lot of us thought, since we have such deep roots in the community, we
could wait it out. It was hopeful at first. Now it isn't so hopeful.
Things aren't moving fast."
Many of the former space
workers find camaraderie and job tips each Friday at the weekly
breakfast of the Spacecoast Technical Network, a group created by former
Kennedy Space Center workers. Just hours before 70 members dined on
eggs, biscuits and coffee at a recent meeting, three Chinese astronauts
parachuted back to Earth in a capsule halfway around the world. For the
space workers, it was yet another sign of the growing competition facing
the United States as a leader of space exploration. At the moment, the
United States has no way of sending astronauts to space in its own
vehicles, and NASA is relying on the Soviet-made Soyuz capsules to send
U.S. astronauts to the international space station.
One
of the network's founders, Bill Bender, recently joined more than two
dozen other colleagues working on a reconnaissance project for a
contractor in Afghanistan where they are earning six-figure annual
incomes.
Bender had been out of work for about a year
from his job on the cancelled Constellation program when he took the
one-year contract to work halfway around the world.
"As
the months passed, I began to realize the hard reality that things I had
known and taken for granted no longer existed. Stable work, good pay,
benefits, etc. were no longer a reasonable expectation," Bender wrote in
a recent email from Afghanistan. "As time went by and it was getting
closer to a year without a job ... the (Afghan) opportunity looked
better and better. The money was very good due to compensation for
hardship and danger."
Those who have remained on
the Space Coast without jobs are cutting back on small luxuries.
Harrington has trimmed back on eating out and vacations.
Al
Schmidt, who worked 27 years at the space center, has cut back on using
his car and utilities at home to save money. The 60-year-old's
unemployment benefits are running out soon, and without a new U.S. space
program offering ready-to-go jobs, he is contemplating retirement,
something he doesn't want to do.
"I live day to day. I
can't afford new cars or lots of groceries," Schmidt said. "From where I
sit, there is nothing coming online soon enough to resolve my problem."
