TITUSVILLE, Fla. — A new spaceship factory is opening in Titusville, and with it, dozens of jobs will be added to the hundreds of employees already on the clock working with NASA to send U.S. astronauts back to the moon.

Lockheed Martin's new lunar capsule facility is called Spacecraft Test, Assembly and Resource, or STAR, and will be a site to build spacecraft for NASA's Artemis program. The 55,000-square-foot revamped building is the former home of the Astronaut Training Experience and Space Camp attraction, which shuttered in 2015.

The company put in $20 million over an 18-month period, transforming it into a spacecraft factory.

By August, 40 people will work at Lockheed Martin's new Spacecraft Test, Assembly and Resource facility in Titusville. (Spectrum News/Jon Shaban)

"I'm thrilled that we will be able to bring this back to my home and where I'm from," says Lockheed Martin Orion Program Manager Kelly DeFazio, a Titusville native who is heading her company's effort to build Artemis spacecraft.

DeFazio, who has worked in the space business for more than 30 years and whose father worked on the Apollo program, says the company is "repurposing this building from inspiring our youth, to literally the hardware that will transport our astronauts to space."

Forty people will eventually work at the facility by August, producing components like Orion's heat shield, thermal protection system, propulsion system and life support system.

Many of the tasks now performed by 360 workers at the historic Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy Space Center will be transferred to the new facility. The two places, 10 miles apart, will be able to connect digitally to streamline production.

"It's going to eliminate a lot of nonproductive work that's associated with reconfiguring the O & C," NASA Assistant Orion Program Manager Paul Marshall says. "We are working toward much more efficient systems."

DeFazio says she is encouraged her hometown is rebounding from the nearly 10,000 jobs lost at the end of the space shuttle program a decade ago.

"I want people to rally around the space program,” she says. “I want people to think of how we continue to grow."

In 2019, NASA awarded a nearly $5 billion contract to Lockheed to build six Orion capsules. A test flight is slated for the late this year.

The Artemis III mission is scheduled to send astronauts back to the moon in 2024.