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.
"Having an industrial base is something this administration doesn't seem to be mature enough to understand," he said.
If the Constellation program goes away, the nation not only loses those high-end jobs, but employees who fill those jobs may not return if the nation needed to ramp up the space program again, Bishop said.
Also, space exploration has direct ties to missile defense because rockets and missiles are based on the same technology, he said.
"There are some core projects government has to do," Bishop said, citing military defense, which is mandated by the Constitution, and space exploration.
On the home front
In Brigham City, there's no shortage of people who work for, have worked for or know someone who works for ATK.
You don't even have to go farther than City Hall on tree-lined Main Street.
Mayor Dennis Fife, who retired from ATK in 2006, said he's concerned for the future of Brigham City, which owes its growth to the jobs in Promontory, about 30 miles to the west.
The average income and specialized jobs created by the space industry helped build up various sections of town. If it goes away, Fife foresees abandoned homes, along with plummeting housing prices, commerce and sales tax revenue.
"Our local area and this community will be devastated," Fife said.
It's happened before.
Fife and his assistant, Sharon Brailsford, remember the hundreds of jobs that were cut from Thiokol, ATK's forerunner in Promontory, between 1962 and 1964.
"Whole subdivisions were vacant," said Brailsford, who worked at ATK as a secretary from 1961 to 1970.
But ATK also is a great community sponsor, Fife said. The company donates to schools, the Boys and Girls Club and participates in the city's annual Peach Days celebration.
It's the single-largest employer in Box Elder County and has been part of the bedrock of the community for 50 years, said Paul Larsen, Brigham City's community and economic development director.
"I think there's going to be some pain," he said, "and hopefully, over time, some things stabilize."
Larsen said state, county and city officials, along with leadership from ATK and NASA, are starting to organize a committee to help see the community through a potentially rough time.
Brigham City resident Jack Leavitt was wearing a Thiokol denim shirt when a couple of Deseret News reporters landed on his doorstep.
After working for the company for 32 years as an engineer, Leavitt retired in 2007.
"It doesn't make sense when we're trying to improve the economy and create jobs to lay people off and send the money to Russia," he said.
Leavitt called the president's plan to let private industry take over space transport "wishful thinking."
He has friends at ATK who are working on Ares, and they're uneasy about the future.
"It's depressing, especially when we have a chance to create jobs," Leavitt said. "(This is) moving in the opposite direction."
He predicts a congressional battle brewing — a sentiment with which the mayor, residents, ATK officials and Bishop can agree.
And that's because ATK doesn't just affect Utah.
Bishop said about 7,000 ATK jobs nationwide are related to the Ares rockets.
But ATK officials say that up to 20,000 jobs are associated with the program, which includes government employees, government contractors and jobs in other companies associated with the Constellation program.
One of the problems, Bishop said, is that Obama's budget seems to arbitrarily cut out Constellation and leave NASA without a clear goal or mission.
And that's how you court disaster, he said.
"I hope the Congress will organize itself," Bishop said, noting that various committees with oversight are feeling "unkind" toward the president's plan.
Destination
Just because the president has proposed cutting the Constellation program, which includes the Ares I and Ares V rockets, whose motors are built by ATK, doesn't mean a death knell is immediately sounding for the jobs of thousands who work for the company.
The budget hasn't been approved by Congress yet.
Company spokeswoman Trina Patterson said ATK still has plenty of work with at least four shuttle missions left after Sunday's early morning launch.
The company still has contracts for ground tests of the Ares rocket motors and for a flight test of the rocket's abort motor.
On Feb. 25, the company will perform its final ground test of a shuttle rocket motor to ensure the safe fly-out of the remaining four shuttle missions.
Funding for fiscal 2010 is locked in place and can't be canceled, Patterson said.
Kent Rominger, ATK vice president of test research and operations and a former astronaut, said he thinks the president doesn't realize what Ares can do for the United States.
"It's the bargain of the century," Rominger said.
The private companies don't have the experience or the success record to make space exploration possible, he said.
Even with the impending shutdown of the space shuttle, there's still a gap of four years before Ares would be able to fly.
SpaceEx, one of the private companies vying for space flight, has had only one successful launch out of four, Rominger said.
Without Ares, he said, "we just gave up our leadership in space."
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