Nearly 300 workers at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility have been laid off after the company that employed them lost its contract with the space agency, according to a notice the company sent to the Louisiana Workforce Commission.
Syncom Space Services, which provided operations and facilities maintenance at Michoud and the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for nearly 10 years, said in a federally mandated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, filed with the commission that it would lay off 296 employees at Michoud at the end last month because its contract with NASA expired June 30 and had not been renewed.
NASA declined to comment. But in a post on its website, the space agency said it had selected a new contractor, NOVA Space Solutions of Anchorage, Alaska, to take over the $822.7 million contract at Michoud and Stennis.
The SLS intertank assembly is seen during a tour of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
It is not clear how many of the affected employees were based at Michoud and how many were at Stennis. The WARN notice that S3, as the company is known, filed with the LWC does not specify where the jobs were located. S3 did not file a WARN with the Mississippi Workforce Commission, according to that agency’s website.
The notice does, however, say that dozens of positions were affected, including electricians, environmental technicians, engineers, maintenance workers, millwrights and power plant operators.
S3 did not respond to a request seeking comment and NOVA Space Solutions could not be reached for comment. The change in contractors does not necessarily spell long-term job losses for all of the affected workers. In many cases, new vendors with large contracts will extend offers to rehire some, if not most, of the employees into similar or comparable positions.
Questionable future
The changes at Michoud comes just three months after Boeing, the lead contractor on NASA’s Artemis space program, said it would lay off 89 employees at Michoud, raising fresh doubts about the future of the program and the role New Orleans may play in getting astronauts back to the Moon.
Even before President Donald Trump’s election last fall, NASA’s Artemis program, a $24 billion initiative to return manned crews to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars, was facing cost overruns and delays.
The core stage of the Artemis II rocket is rolled out at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. The core stage is being transported to a barge for its voyage to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Staff photo by Brett Duke, The Times-Picayune)
Trump said earlier this year he wanted to phase out the Space Launch System (SLS) rockets, which are built at Michoud, that power Artemis and replace them with more cost efficient, commercial rockets. But the One Big Beautiful Bill passed by Congress last week and signed by Trump, includes $4.1 billion in funding for two upcoming Artemis missions, as well as $120 million for improvements at Stennis and $30 million for improvements at Michoud.
Still, the administration has said it wants to replace SLS with less expensive commercial rockets after the launches of Artemis II and III, scheduled for 2026 and 2027
Any cuts to Artemis would signal yet another blow to Michoud. The facility, and the parts of the space program it supports, has been touted as one of the economic bright spots in New Orleans East.
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