Photo by Edward Linsmier for The New York Times
Photo by Edward Linsmier for The New York Times –  At Embraer Air in Melbourne, Florida

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Published: March 29, 2013

The day after the shuttle Atlantis landed for the last time at the Kennedy Space Center on July 21, 2011, Angel Telles, a man with three master’s degrees, scooped up his white Mission 101 coffee mug and drove away from NASA after 24 years on the job there.

The shuttle era had ended, and with it the jobs of 8,000 NASA and civilian workers who found themselves unemployed in the midst of a harsh economic downturn and a crush of home foreclosures.

Read The New York Times’ story