About 8,000 individuals currently working on the America space program will lose their jobs now that the space shuttle program has ended. As many as 1,500 will be fired as soon as Friday.

The program has been scheduled to end for quite some time, but the Obama Administration went further in blocking the successor program to the space shuttle.

These employees are no longer required now that the United States will pay hefty sums to hitchhike on Russian spacecraft. And it’ll be many, many years before the next planned NASA programs go into effect.

So chalk-up another 11,000 job losses to the millions we’ve already tallied. But don’t worry, because we’re going to pay the Russians $60 million per trip to do what we were doing before. That’s so much better.