Lockheed to cut 1,200 jobs, many at Newtown site

Lockheed Martin Corp.'s space-systems business will cut 1,200 positions, or nearly 8 percent of the unit's workforce, by the end of the year, with a particularly large effect expected at the company's facility in Newtown, Bucks County.

"It's too soon to anticipate what Newtown will look like," said Lockheed spokesman Stephen Tatum in California.

The company employs 126,000 people worldwide, including 16,000 in Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. - the branch that includes the Newtown facility, which has 1,100 employees. Space Systems also employs 300 people in Valley Forge.

Employees will be offered voluntary buyout programs first, the company said.

"It is anticipated that middle management will be reduced by 25 percent," the company said in a statement. Major job cuts in Space Systems also will occur in Sunnyvale, Calif., and in Denver, the company said.

"It's primarily in the sites where we have major spacecraft programs in production," Tatum said.

The recession had taken a toll on Lockheed's business, he said. Newtown is the headquarters, he said, for Lockheed's commercial-space-satellite business, and those customers are paring their orders because of the slow economy.

Governments are also cutting back on their orders for satellites, he said.

"We have fewer new business opportunities on the horizon," he said. Also, competition from manufacturers in the United States and Europe has heated up. "Affordability is a major initiative for our customers," Tatum said.

Lockheed was part of a three-company team awarded a $1.4 billion defense contract in 2008 to build the GPS III, the latest generation of global-positioning satellites. Newtown, he said, is where Lockheed designed the satellites.

The design phase, he said, required many engineers and quality-assurance technicians. "We designed them in Newtown, and now we're in production," he said. The production takes place in Denver.

Some manufacture of other products takes place in Newtown, he said.

The Space Systems unit designs, manufactures, and operates human spaceflight systems, remote-sensing navigation, meteorological and communications satellites and instruments, space observatories and interplanetary spacecraft, ballistic missiles, and missile-defense systems.