BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – For the second time this week, Central Florida’s booming Space Coast actually has fewer jobs available.
News 6 reported Monday how with the uncertain future of NASA’s overbudgeted, often-delayed Artemis program Boeing could lay off 400 of its workers on the SLS rocket.
Now, 1,000 workers nationwide are being laid off at Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin.
You can read the full email to employees from CEO Dave Limp here :
Folks,
“We just finished this morning’s meeting, during which I gave an update on our organization. As I mentioned, we have made the tough decision to reduce our workforce by about 10%. The impact this has is not lost on any of us—we are saying goodbye to our friends and colleagues who have helped us build Blue into what it is today.
I know this is a lot to absorb, and I would like to explain how we got here. Over the last few months, as a leadership team, we have worked together to define our 2025 Annual Operating Plan and growth strategy. Our primary focus in 2025 and beyond is to scale our manufacturing output and launch cadence with speed, decisiveness, and efficiency for our customers. We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed. It also became clear that the makeup of our organization must change to ensure our roles are best aligned with executing these priorities. Sadly, this resulted in eliminating some positions in engineering, R&D, and program/project management and thinning out our layers of management.
While I acknowledge that these messages are better delivered personally and individually, the reach of these changes across multiple locations and teams makes that difficult. We will notify impacted employees immediately via their work and personal email addresses of their status with Blue. We will also email employees who are not impacted to confirm their employment with Blue. Both emails will arrive by 7:30 AM PT/10:30 AM ET today. While our sites are open, I encourage you to work from home for the rest of the day if your role allows you to do so.
We are doing what we can to support everyone impacted. The email notifications will provide support details, which include severance packages, COBRA coverage, career support services, and access to counseling through our Employee Assistance Program.
Let me add that I am extremely confident in the enormous opportunities in front of us and have never been more optimistic about our mission. We will continue to invest, invent, and hire hundreds of positions in areas that will help us achieve our goals and best serve our customers. We will be a stronger, faster, and more customer-focused company that consistently meets and exceeds our commitments. This year alone, we will land on the Moon, deliver a record number of incredible engines, and fly New Glenn and New Shepard on a regular cadence.
To our colleagues who are impacted today, thank you so much for your hard work and passion for our mission. I hope we all support one another with grace and empathy while upholding our leadership principles during this time.”
- Dave
News 6 reporter James Sparvero just spoke with Limp before the first launch of the New Glenn rocket last month.
”Everybody’s in it for the mission here,” the CEO said. “And days like this, it is not hard to get people out of bed. They’re excited to be here.”
Friday, Sparvero asked CBS News space consultant Bill Harwood if he finds it surprising after a big success like getting to orbit for the first time that Limp would actually let go of some workers.
”If you think about it, they were working three shifts around the clock ramping up to that first flight,” Harwood explained. “I can understand that you could have more people needed to get through that development phase than you would need for actual operations, which is where they’re headed. I think we have to take them at their word. They just had more people than they need now and they’re letting them go, but if you’re in that one in ten that are getting that slip, that’s a tough day.”
The New Glenn rocket factory is right next door to the Kennedy Space Center.
Harwood said he thinks the situation with the layoffs at Boeing is different than Blue Origin’s.
”The problem that’s going on right now is the whole industry is in a wait-and-see mode to find out what the Trump administration is actually going to do in terms of perhaps, giving NASA a new direction,” he said.
The Space Launch System in the Vehicle Assembly Building is being prepared to carry astronauts around the moon in 2026 before a landing the following year.
“We don’t know yet if this is gonna survive this change in administration,” Harwood said. “If SLS doesn’t survive, the other companies working on the rocket would be affected too.”
On Monday, another space journalist, Dr. Ken Kremer, commented on the Boeing layoffs. Kremer feared cancelling SLS could have an impact locally like the end of the space shuttle program did back in 2011.
“You’re gonna have thousands of people laid off,” he said. “That is gonna hurt the local economy and it’s gonna hurt tourism, people who wanna see these launches.”
NASA is scheduling its next Artemis media day for reporters on March 7.
Stick with News 6 and ClickOrlando.com for updates on the moon program’s future.