Homes for sale huntsville Huntsville Alabama Real Estate

Huntsville Raids Florida's Space Jobs

Florida will be losing thousands of NASA engineers to Huntsville, Ala.,

City leaders in Huntsville been actively recruiting workers to fill a windfall of 4,500 jobs that will be relocated to Huntsville with consolidation of the U.S. Army's Missile Defense Agency.

Proactive job recruitment is survival instinct developed into strategy, says former Huntsville mayor Loretta Spencer, a spearhead of Huntsville's BRAC recruitment in the last two years. "We have been recruiting since the 1970s when we had NASA cutbacks as well as recruiting industry from all over the world," Spencer told Business Alabama magazine in November. "With those experiences and successes, I feel we are well-rounded in knowledge about what people look at when considering relocating."

Missile Defense Agency, headquartered at Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal, had a 2008 budget of $8.7 billion. The agency's programs include the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) system. Lockheed Martin builds THAAD interceptors in Troy, and Northrop Grumman announced this year that it would headquarter its KEI program in Huntsville.

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