COLORADO SPRINGS — United Launch Alliance’s quest to become more nimble and agile in order to compete effectively in the space industry will include workforce reductions beyond the 375 job cuts confirmed last week.

CEO Tory Bruno on Wednesday said Centennial-based ULA plans to reduce its workforce by another 400 to 500 people next year.

“We have this year’s 375,” Bruno said. “There will be another one at the end of next year that’s a bit larger but along the same order of magnitude. And then we’re done.”

The reductions in 2017 will be spread across all five of ULA’s sites, he said. Those are in Colorado, California, Texas, Alabama and Washington, D.C.

ULA currently employs 3,400 people, with about 1,500 in Colorado.

After the second round of reductions, ULA will move forward with the “size of workforce that we need,” Bruno said, adding that “as we are competitive with that, I expect to expand our market share and start growing back from there.”

Next year’s job cuts, like the 375 targeted for the end of this year, will be voluntary, he said.

“These kinds of actions, even when they’re voluntary, they’re kind of hard on the workforce,” he said. “You want to just get it over with so you can move ahead and be back to business as usual. I would do it in one step, but we can’t because of the really busy manifest we have. So we’ve had to spread it over these two years. My plan is for that to be the end.”

The Centennial-based developer of spacecraft launchers faces pressure from new competitors.

In particular, Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. broke ULA’s monopoly on national security launches last year after receiving certification to launch satellites for the Pentagon.

In November, ULA dropped out of a bidding process against SpaceX for the launch of a satellite for the Air Force-run Global Positioning System. At the time, ULA said it wouldn’t compete unless the Pentagon let it buy more Russian-made RD-180 engines. The government declined.

ULA, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. formed in 2006, has cut costs over the past year and expanded more into commercial space so it is less reliant on government contracts. On Monday, ULA announced a partnership with Bigelow Aerospace to ferry inflatable habitats into orbit.

In June, ULA cut 12 executive positions, or 30 percent of its team.

A month later, the company announced it would put a small engineering team in Pueblo to bring some of its rocket testing in-house. The propulsion testing facility will help on the company’s existing Atlas and Delta rockets and its new Vulcan launch system, which will include reusable booster engines.

And last month, ULA partnered with Blue Origin, Aerojet Rocketdyne and the Air Force to make new engines in the United States.

Alicia Wallace: 303-954-1939, awallace @denverpost.com or twitter.com/aliciawallace