Fla.'s space coast feels pain of shuttle's end

Workers at the Kennedy Space Center always knew the end of the shuttle program would bring hard times to Florida's Space Coast. They just couldn't predict how much pain.

Some 7,000 jobs are being cut, and potential replacement positions evaporated last year when President Barack Obama scrapped plans to return astronauts to the moon. Soon-to-be-jobless space workers and those who've already lost their jobs are now competing for work in a labor market where more than one in 10 is unemployed.

And the Space Coast is still reeling from the housing crisis, making it tougher for workers to sell their homes and move elsewhere for a job. "Everything is taking a turn for the worst, it seems like," said Kevin Smith, local president of the Union for space center firefighters, paramedics and workers at emergency landing sites. "What little is out there, everybody is competing for."

The aerospace jobs that would be natural fits for the laid-off space workers are in places like South Carolina, Oklahoma and the Pacific Northwest. The Boeing Co. and other aerospace companies with workers at the space center are hiring some of their shuttle workers at airplane factories. "We don't need rocket scientists to build commercial aircraft but we need smart people," said Stephen Davis, a Boeing spokesman.

But those jobs only number in the dozens, possibly hundreds at best. And even if space workers get hired out of state, they would have to sell their homes in the worst housing collapse in decades. The median value of a home in Cape Canaveral, the nearest city to the space center, went from under $250,000 in 2007 to around $110,000 in May, according to the real estate website Zillow. 

Source: Associated Press