Paragon lays off staff after Gateway cancellation

WASHINGTON — A subcontractor for a module that was being developed for NASA’s lunar Gateway has laid off 70 people after NASA halted work on the program.

Paragon Space Development Corp. announced Aug. 11 that it performed a “companywide restructuring” after its contract to provide life support systems for the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, or HALO, module was terminated by Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the module.

HALO was part of the Gateway, a facility NASA planned to develop in near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon to support Artemis missions, with contributions from several countries. NASA announced at its Ignition event in March that it was indefinitely halting work on Gateway, effectively canceling it.

Paragon, based in Tucson, Arizona, said the layoffs affected personnel in Arizona, Colorado and Texas.

“Our workforce reduction is one of the most difficult decisions in Paragon’s 33-year history, affecting people who have given this company and this industry their best work,” said Mark Greeley, president and chief executive of Paragon, in a statement.

Paragon was a subcontractor to Northrop and said it expected Northrop to compensate the company for closeout costs. Paragon will also retain the intellectual property rights to the life support technologies it had been developing for HALO.

Northrop announced Aug. 4 that it would fly some technologies it developed for HALO, including power and avionics systems, to the moon on three Lunar Infrastructure Demo missions starting later this decade. Northrop is working with NASA on those missions, which will use commercial landers NASA will procure through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Northrop executives previously said they were looking at ways to reuse the HALO module itself, arguing it could be converted into a lunar habitat. The company, though, acknowledged corrosion issues with the module’s structure, provided by another subcontractor, Thales Alenia Space, that needed to be addressed.

Paragon said the loss of the HALO contract is a setback but not a fatal blow to the company. “Gateway’s cancellation changes one program. It does not change what our customers need or what we do best,” Greeley said. “Human spaceflight still depends on the systems that let people live and work in extreme environments, the work Paragon has done for more than three decades.”

Paragon, which has specialized in life support systems and related technologies throughout its history, said it is looking at ways it can apply that expertise to NASA’s lunar base plans and other government and commercial projects.

Reporting from SpaceNews contributed to this story.