United Space Alliance is a name that many of you may not be familiar with on the whole. So before we talk about the job cuts to come in the near future to the company lets begin by taking about how they have chosen to describe themselves, “Recognized performance. Efficient, reliable products and services. Innovative solutions for operating complex systems. This is United Space Alliance. We leverage our experience and expertise for customers in the defense, civil and commercial space, and energy industries. Our broad skill set uniquely qualifies us to help customers develop new concepts, systems and operations that will support today’s challenges on Earth and tomorrow’s exploration of space.” The company focuses on making space exploration happen.

Sadly the company is getting ready to cat back on 344 jobs in the state of Florida in order to cut back on its expenses. Job cuts of this scale are enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” The only good news is under a mass layoff action is that the workers will be given several weeks of notice before they are let go off of the payroll and put onto the unemployment line.

This is not the fist time that the company has turned to layoffs in order to save  on its budget. For those of you who missed out on our coverage of the earlier cuts made by the company here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all, “The company is getting ready to cut back on 157 jobs in its current round of layoffs. The bulk of the layoffs will be coming from workers who are currently at Kennedy Space Center. That location will lose 121 jobs, enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines.”

This company is, as you can imagine, not the only space company to make cuts. Space Systems/Loral made recent cuts as well, “The Company is getting ready to cut back on about 90 jobs from its facility. All of the jobs to be cut are coming from the jobs in Palo Alto. This is more then enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current guidelines set by the federal government.”

These cuts are enough to make workers in the aerospace industry nervous as to the certainty of their futures.