10% Layoff At SpaceX
SpaceX to lay off 10% of its workforce, LA Times
“SpaceX will lay off about 10% of its more than 6,000 employees, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.”
SpaceX Statement on Workforce Downsizing
“To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft anda global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company. Either of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations. This means we must part ways with some talented and hardworking members of our team. We are grateful for everything they have accomplished and their commitment to SpaceX’s mission. This action is taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.”
With commercial crew almost done and only a need for a limited number of Dragon 2 capsules for NASA it’s not surprising, but still sad.
I also saw a tweet that indicated interest in building future rockets in Brownsville which would save a lot a money given the more favorable business environment in Texas. With cheaper land, less taxes and regulation it’s a move that would make sense for the firm.
In addition to the cost savings of shipping to KSC from Texas v.s. California.
Yes, and not having to ship the Starship and Super Heavy via the Panama Canal by barge.
Yes. You know I’ve wondered about this cost, assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that since it’s rarely remarked, the actual amount must be trivial in the overall spreadsheet. And, with the well-qualified Ms. Shotwell driving the bus, again I figured the cost must be acceptable. No doubt there’s some sort of trade-off.
But that don’t wash, as they say in Texas; ANY cost is subject to scrutiny.
I suspect it’s mostly because Elon Musk loves hanging with the Hollywood crowd in LA. If he looked at it from a pure economic viewpoint he would be out of the state. As it is economics may well be winning out anyway.
They’re in LA because it has a large concentration of aerospace workers & engineers.
True, there is still a legacy workforce, but workers are mobile and many would find life much better in Texas, with no state income tax and housing costing only a fraction of what it costs in LA. Already workers in other industries are leaving which is why UHaul rates out of California are so high.
SpaceX has over 400 job listings but only 1 for Brownsville is my understanding. So if they do a slow lay off of 600 as they are adding 400 new jobs.. almost a wash.
How long has SpaceX been building up a carbon fiber work force? All the hardware we saw for that. Looks like the almost overnight switch from carbon fiber to stainless steel called for a workforce realignment?
It is much easier to get super smart engineers (and their wives) to relocate to LA than to rural Texas. And there are tons of great aerospace engineers in SoCal already. There is more to life than taxes.
WRT “and their wives”. You do know that there are female engineers – who are also smart – at NASA …
Yes, I should have said ‘Spouses’. And if you are recruiting the absolute best, there needs to be something for that spouse to do in the area that he or she will find interesting or rewarding.
You do know that both Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth are known for their aerospace communities, as well as other activties? Both the F-16 and F-35 are being built in Texas. How many fighters are being built in LA these days? Bell builds all its helicopers here and has been doing so for decades. How many helicopters were produced in California last year? And are you really able to compare JPL with JSC in terms of importance to the future of human spaceflight?
But like many of us in “fly over” country I am used to folks from NYC and LA looking down on the rest of the nation. Maybe you should stop by and see just what activities are available in Texas these days. There are a lot more things to do here than barn dances and hayrides. 🙂
Look at the bright side. It’s not just Texas. I had a conversation like this a few months ago, with someone at Goddard. I said he might consider transferring to a different NASA center (a possibility since his sort of work isn’t too specialized.) He was totally unenthusiastic about Cleveland (Glenn) or Hampton (Langley).
I went to a meeting a number of years ago at the Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach (the old TRW one). It was the first time I had gone to LA without renting a car (I took the bus from the airport terminal to the new light rail, which took me close to a hotel nearby the facility). I remember, one evening after the meeting, a bunch of us walked to a very nice restaurant near the beach itself, then ended up walking along the beach for awhile and watching a very pretty sunset, before walking back to the hotel.
Yes, LA is an expensive place to live, but that kind of experience is kind of hard to replicate elsewhere….
You could do the same thing in Houston, and you won’t be forced to take public transit since the roads are not jammed with cars. Texas is not afraid to build new freeways when needed. Gas is only $1.90 a gallon. And there are many world class restaurants on the sea wall in Galveston.
I was in LA over Christmas. It took three hours to go from Irvine to near LAX. Gas was $3.90 a gallon. As soon as you leave the freeway and go on the surface streets you see the homeless on every corner and living under the overpasses. Yes, it’s hard to replicate the LA experience, although I hear NYC is worst…
The Rio Grande Valley is even nicer, with orange groves, palm trees and green jays, a real taste of the tropics with its lush vegetation and clouds of brightly colored butterflies. I hear California used to be like that in the 1930’s before urban sprawl ruined it. No, it’s not a desert as some Easterners think it is. BTW it was also the site of the first international commercial rocket mail flight in 1936, the teenage rocketeer later went on to design the Minuteman and SRBs. But that is another story, part of the long history of Texas and commercial rockets.
I think the phrase, “forced to take public transit,” pretty much says it all. Some people _like_ using public transportation. I can read, or post comments to NASA Watch, when I’m on the bus or light rail. I couldn’t if I had to drive. I actually haven’t owned a car in years. I don’t have to worry about parking, insurance, maintenance, etc. I know other people (yourself included) feel differently. That’s why the economic aspects of moving from one city to another are only part of the picture.
I grew up in the Chicago area in the 1970’s when one took their life in their hands taking public transit. Everyone I knew who rode it on a regular basis was robbed at least once and the condition of the vehicles is best left unstated.
I understand it has improved since then and is in better shape in richer parts of the nation, but I haven’t had any reason to test it.
That’s sometimes called the “two body problem”, at least in fields where people would get the reference to Newton’s solution to orbital motion. It gets nasty when both people are in relatively specialized fields. An aerospace engineer and a business manager isn’t too bad. An aerospace engineer and a professor of biology would be worse.
I guess you could take the joke a step further. If they also had a kid and were looking to live in a good school district, that might be called a “three body problem”, and in orbital dynamics, the three body problem does not have any solutions.
Money isn’t everything. Some people prefer to live in a big city rather that a small town. For them, the lower cost of living in Texas might not compensate for moving away from a big city.
Although I will mention an old joke about Los Angeles (and one that also applies to several cities in Texas.) Why are those cities different from yogurt? Yogurt has an active, living culture.
Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has nearly 8 million, while the San Antonio-Austin corridor has around 4 million. But I see your point, many feel it is better to live in a tiny studio apartment in New York than a mansion in Dallas. Still, the type of folks that need the bright lights of big cities are not going to do very well as space settlers. And it is nice to see birds, butterflies and stars in the wild instead of going to a planetarium or zoo ?
I was thinking more in terms of art, music and theater, and substantial variety in all of those. Also, there are plenty of national parks and a huge amount of national forests and other public lands in Southern California. Admittedly, the nicer places are a good drive from Los Angeles. But I’ll admit the yogurt joke was a bit out of line…
More to the point, since we were talking about SpaceX, I was also thinking of Brownsville (population around 180,000.) Commuting to Boca Chica from San Antonio, or even Corpus Christi, would be a bit extreme. I also can’t think of many big space companies in Dallas (I’m not counting the aviation-related work associated with a major hub airport) or San Antonio (SwRI’s Division 15 isn’t actually all that big.) UT Austin does some nice work, but I wouldn’t call them a major aerospace employer.
But everyone has different standards and preferences. I once knew a very smart undergraduate, so good she was actively recruited for grad school by UCLA and University of Montana. The pay they offered did scale with cost of living, and they are both excellent programs in solar physics (her field.) Academic and economic factors balancing, she was going back and forth between surfing and snowboarding.
Maybe. But you’d be living in Texas 🙂
Given its reported he works anything up to 16 hrs a day , I doubt it has anything to do with hanging out with Hollywood celebs !
I suspect the shipping costs aren’t a big deal. Most of the cost for aerospace projects tends to go into people’s salaries. In this case, shipping a Falcon 9 would involve pre-shipping inspections, lots of work putting it on the ship without breaking anything, securing it so it doesn’t get damaged in rough seas, unloading without breaking anything, post-shipping inspections, etc. I suspect all that costs more than the difference due to the distance traveled. Although going through the Canal does add problems of its own.
I don’t think we really know the block 5 reusability story yet.
Nor should we as that is sensitive information that is critical to the competitive advantage SpaceX is creating relative to other firms. I am surprised that Elon Musk shares as much as he does online.
He usually does a decent job of it. The tweets typically have just enough information to keep people interested, but not enough to really give anything away. Of course, he doesn’t always get the balance right, and most of what he says about schedules might as well be disinformation, but…
With block 5’s piling up the need to make F9 1st stages declines. And only so many people can be swung over to making more stage 2’s and BFR
And meanwhile, there are about 6 long pages of job openings related to StarLink, PCB work, manufacturing, Dragon 2, avionics, etc.
A realignment for those big upcoming projects.
Yep, moving from being a NASA contractor to a true commercial firm. He is leaving the tar baby behind him and moving on.
That makes more sense. The SpaceX statement gave me the impression they were cutting their workforce. With Starship, Super Heavy and a new communications satellite to develop, that didn’t make sense to me. If they’re dumping 600 people whose skills they no longer need, and hiring a similar number of people with needed skills, I can see how that makes sense. I might not like treating employees that way. Retraining is more expensive, but I think you get more out of employees who know that’s a possibility. But that’s a separate issue.
I wondered about that as well.
To me retraining has been largely inexplicable, except at the lower, semi-skilled levels. For instance I can make a gardener out of an experienced landscape construction supervisor in a year or so, given the right person. But how do I take a trained landscape architect who has spent her entire life in planting design, then turn her loose on roadway alignments? Or land planning? Sure she had training in college but that might have been 10 or 15 years in the past.
That’s my thinking as I imagine the kinds of workers being swapped. Here I might be over my head; but I imagine the skills associated with high-strength carbon and associated epoxies to be dramatically different from those involving stainless steel specification and fabrication. In both cases, perhaps a shop foreman could do both jobs, if my analogy holds at all (or not).
You’re right. It does depend on the jobs, and we don’t know what those 600-odd jobs they are cutting are. And I’m not going to read through 400-odd jobs ads to find out who they’re hiring.
Some things are easier than others. A mechanical engineer working on rocket engines would need some training before working on communications satellites. But that would be manageable. I can think of some computer programers who have shifted to environmental science and things like climate modeling, but that might involve working part time and going to grad school in parallel. On the other hand, scientists should never be retasked to write production software…
I guess retraining was too specific. There are other possibilities like severance pay and help finding new jobs. I was really concerned with simply tossing people out when you no longer need their particular skills. That makes recruiting harder and limits how enthusiastic your current employees will be.
I’m sorry about replying to myself, but more recent news makes me think I should. It looks like the people SpaceX is letting go get two months severance pay and significant help finding new jobs. That isn’t too bad.
And he won’t need very many Dragon2’s to supply NASA ISS needs even if NASA demands an unflown one for every flight. Two Dragon2’s a year until the ISS is shutdown would only be a dozen or so.
The favoritism by paying more to Boeing and other companies for the same job does not serve the United States well.
It’s far from favoritism. NASA asked both companies for prices, among other contractual niceties. They got back what they got back. If anything, SpaceX left money on the table but they had no way of knowing that.
NASA did want more than one supplier, and it would be an amazing coincidence if the lowest two bids had the same cost. But I also think NASA is getting exactly what it paid for from Boeing. SpaceX does have an innovative approach to just about everything. That raises concerns about success, at least for some people in the field. Making sure one supplier has a conventional and conservative approach, even if it costs more, could easily have been a deliberate decision to reduce risk.
If I got laid off after putting in 80 hr/week (or whatever SpaceX demanded) after SpaceX has been so successful, I’d be pissed!
And you’d be in high demand most anywhere else, and not just in aerospace. A CV with SpaceX experience is a valuable commodity.
Where are the 600 being cut from, Calif. manufacturing site? Texas test site, Fl launch site? People always said that SpaceX was lean and cost efficient while ULA was bloated and wasteful. But now in Fl alone, SX has more people and more facilities than ULA, a complete reversal. There are big costs to maintaining a lot of facilities and a standing army.
I heard 577 from Hawthorne.
Yes, here are all the details from the legal filing SpaceX had to make on it.
https://www.businessinsider…
These are the 577 positions SpaceX is cutting at its headquarters in a major round of layoffs
David Mosher and Samantha Lee
As expected the majority are jobs involving working with composites, structures and propulsion reflecting the shift from composites to Stainless Steel, the transition of commercial crew from R&D to flight status and the Raptor moving to operation status.
RIFWatch! Everything old is new again!
What gets me is the way they did it. Laying off people by e-mail? Are you kidding me?
SpaceX is moving Starship & Super Heavy to Texas. No more Port of LA etc. which explains the big layoffs at Hawthorne.
https://www.latimes.com/bus….