By IANS/EFE,
Cape Canaveral (Florida) : The coming end of the space shuttle era will take away the jobs of 24,000 people who hope to be able to find work in the private sector and keep the economy in this part of Florida’s Atlantic coast alive.
NASA is continuing with the countdown for the Friday launch of the shuttle Atlantis on the programme’s last space mission, if weather conditions do not force a delay.
On what is called the Space Coast, tourists have begun arriving for the launch, but their emotion and excitement contrast with the shadow of uncertainty hanging over the thousands of NASA workers who soon will lose their jobs.
The feeling is “bittersweet”, said Marcia Gaedcke, president of the Chamber of Commerce in Titusville, one of the cities closest to the Kennedy Space Center.
“It’s the end of a 30-year era for this community.”
“The shuttle programme, the launches, the landings have been part of our life and it will be a big emotional and mental change,” she said in an interview with EFE.
Gaedcke recalled that she was 10 when the first shuttle was launched – Columbia in 1981 – and she said that everyone she knows “has worked in the programme in one way or another”.
The end of the shuttle programme has been compared to the end of the Apollo moon program in the 1970s, which also left thousands of people out of work, but this time “it’s going to be different economically” because the population of Titusville and surrounding Brevard County “is very different”, said Gaedcke.
The Kennedy Space Center, she explained, does not employ as many people as it did during the Apollo era and “the people have options in terms of future jobs”, alluding to the many private firms to which the space agency has conceded the task of developing future manned space vehicles and who will be hiring from the NASA employment pool.
Many NASA employees have been preparing for this day ever since the end of the shuttle programme was announced in 2004, according to Gaedcke, who said her organization has been advising workers about how to make this transition, what type of skills they would need and about jobs they could land.
There have been people who have moved away from the area, of course, but the number has not been “significant” and “we haven’t noted a sharp decline in the population”, she said.
Gaedcke said she sees the transition as an “opportunity”, since “many very qualified people will move to the high technology companies”.
With regard to tourism, Gaedcke said that the Kennedy visitors center will house Atlantis after its final flight and “people will keep coming to see this part of US space history”.