Lockheed Martin is trimming its Orion spacecraft workforce by 20%

Lockheed Martin is trimming its Orion spacecraft workforce by 20% as it works with NASA to redefine the vehicle as a crew rescue capsule for International Space Station crews.

The cuts amount to 300 Lockheed Martin employees and 300 subcontractor personnel. While the company is working to find new positions for the displaced staff within the company, “layoff notices are probably inevitable, and that will happen shortly,” according to Linda Karanian, Lockheed’s Washington-based director of human space flight programs.

Orion, like the U.S. space program as a whole, remains in limbo following the Obama administration’s announcement that it wants to cancel the George W. Bush administration’s Constellation Moon-Mars program in favor of myriad technology development efforts and human missions to alternate destinations such as asteroids.

Lockheed Martin anticipates little difficulty in transitioning Orion from a full-up spacecraft intended for missions beyond low Earth orbit to a crew rescue vehicle. “Our current Orion requirements as a crew exploration vehicle encompass any requirements we foresee that would be imposed … on a lifeboat,” Karanian says, noting that the company is convinced it can provide a vehicle that would involve only “marginal delta cost” to NASA beyond the current program.

“We’re looking at various things to use—test vehicles, perhaps, that we’re already on contract for,” Karanian says. “When we’ve completed tests, we [could] provide those to NASA to launch to the space station to serve as lifeboats.” If a decision is made quickly, and appropriate funding provided, the company believes it could have an Orion lifeboat ready for launch to the station by 2013.

Both Lockheed Martin and NASA are in the awkward position of still being legally bound to continue developing Orion as a full-up crew exploration vehicle, since NASA’s Fiscal 2010 appropriation bill forbids the agency from canceling any element of Constellation.

And Congress—which has mounted stiff, bipartisan opposition to Obama’s space plan—is watching both customer and contractor carefully. Some Senate lawmakers recently raised alarms when they received word from Orion subcontractor Alliant Techsystems that no more funding would be forthcoming for Orion’s Launch Abort System (LAS)—a costly safety measure that would not be needed on a scaled-back Orion lifeboat. NASA, they assert, is either violating the law or doing whatever it can to circumvent it (Aerospace DAILY, April 23).

Following a successful pad abort test of the LAS system at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., on May 6, Lockheed Martin believes it can legally “pause” work on the LAS “until NASA decides the direction forward, without impacting launch availability,” Karanian says.

The program has passed a number of other recent milestones, including a preliminary design review in August 2009 and a software PDR in April of this year. The program’s critical design review will begin in September and is likely to extend into 2011.

Orion photo: Guy Norris

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