ars TECHNICA by Eric Berger - 4/18/2024
"Boeing is reviewing and adjusting current staffing levels."On Thursday senior Boeing officials leading the Space Launch System program, including David Dutcher and Steve Snell, convened an all-hands meeting for the more than 1,000 employees who work on the rocket.
According to two people familiar with the meeting, the officials announced that there would be a significant number of layoffs and reassignments of people working on the program. They offered a handful of reasons for the cuts, including the fact that timelines for NASA's Artemis lunar missions that will use the SLS rocket are slipping to the right.
Later on Thursday, in a statement provided to Ars, a Boeing spokesperson confirmed the cuts: "Due to external factors unrelated to our program performance, Boeing is reviewing and adjusting current staffing levels on the Space Launch System program."
Better late than never?For nearly a decade and a half, Boeing has led development of the core stage of the massive SLS rocket that NASA intends to use to launch the Orion spacecraft for its crewed Moon missions.
The contract has been lucrative for Boeing and subject to considerable criticism over the years for its largesse, as NASA has spent tens of billions of dollars developing a rocket that reuses Space Shuttle main engines and other elements. Also, the rocket was originally supposed to make its debut in late 2016 or 2017 but did not actually fly for the first time until November 2022. And NASA's inspector general has characterized Boeing's management of the SLS rocket program at times as "poor."
More:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/amid-schedule-uncertainty-boeing-will-shed-workers-on-sls-rocket-program/
