Final frontier for ATK? Utah cities, jobs, hang in the balance of national space debate

CORINNE, Box Elder County — Few cars were parked outside of the bar after quitting time Wednesday. Inside, the deep fryer, waiting for some raw potatoes, cast a heavy odor.

A few patrons sat at the counter, sipping beer from small pitchers, while basketball blazed on the flat screen.

It was quiet but for the conversation, music and the occasional crack of billiard balls.

"You should have been here last week," says Cindy Guzman, who owns Mim's Bar and Grill in Corinne.

Her place had been packed with people from every rung on the corporate ladder.

"They were drinking and sorrowing in their beer," she says. "They were depressed."

Mim's is on the way home for nearly everyone who works at ATK Space Systems in Promontory, making it an easy place to commiserate after a really bad day at work.

On Jan. 28, citing the phase-out of the space shuttle and Minuteman III ballistic missile, the company laid off 420 workers at its three Utah facilities. ATK officials listed the same reasons in October when 550 employees were laid off.

"For these little towns, that's kind of a lot," said Jason Sackett, a Brigham City resident and former ATK employee.

Before he was laid off in October, Sackett installed propellant in rocket motors in Promontory. He has yet to land a replacement job.

Some of the company's employees had voted for President Barack Obama in 2008, Guzman said.

"And they never will again," she said.

A heavy payload

Every time a space shuttle lifts off, a piece of Utah goes with it.

Rocket motors for the shuttle's boosters are produced in Utah, and so are the motors for the next generation of space flight.

Obama's budget proposal for fiscal 2011, which begins in October, calls for the elimination of the Constellation program, which was started under President George W. Bush and sought to return U.S. astronauts to the moon.

The proposed budget is awaiting approval from Congress, but representatives and senators from states heavily involved in the space program — California, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Utah — are crying foul at a plan they say doesn't seem to have been well thought out.

The budget provides more funding to NASA but focuses on research and technologies while providing incentives to private industry to create the space transportation of the future.

That would leave U.S. astronauts trying to thumb a ride into space on Russian, Chinese or Indian rockets, said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah.

"That doesn't make America No. 1," he said.

Bishop, who represents Utah's 1st Congressional District, said if the president's budget proposal only meant the eventual elimination of his neighbors' jobs, the issue would still be important.

But it's so much more than that, Bishop said Thursday.