The impact of retiring the Space Shuttle in 2010 could cost thousands of NASA contractors their jobs, the agency said in a report on Tuesday. As much as 8,000 contractor jobs could be lost by 2011, after the program ends, but the number of civil service workers should remain roughly the same.

The transition to the next program, called Constellation, will mean a significant job loss, but as numbers seem to get worse as reported by the media, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations William H. Gerstenmaier said, in a telephone conference, that these are merely preliminary assumptions and that job losses might not be as big as they appear now.

Indeed, there are multiple factors that need to be taken into consideration before making such somber estimations, and NASA will have to put a lot of work into this transition: “Through this period, NASA’s greatest asset will continue to be its people…At the same time, our greatest challenge over the next several years will be managing this extremely talented, experienced, and geographically dispersed workforce as we transition from operating the Space Shuttle to utilizing International Space Station and expanding our reach to the Moon, Mars and beyond.”

As part of its strategy, NASA said in its report that is committed to transitioning the Space Shuttle civil servant workforce to other Agency programs and at the same time, it will work on identifying job opportunities for the placement of skilled employees in other organizations.

As far as the contractors go, NASA said in its report: “NASA has provided the Space Shuttle prime contractors with a number of opportunities to help safely manage the Shuttle operations through FY 2010 and to prepare the contractor workforce for Shuttle retirement,” including opportunities for employees to work on other NASA programs. The report unveiled that the number of employees will be down 80 percent by 2011, and as much as 2,300 employees could still remain at Cape Canaveral.