Hours after launching its first rocket of the new year on Friday morning, Elon Musk's company told stunned employees that roughly 10 percent of SpaceX's workforce would be laid off. Workers were sent home early to await notification to their private email addresses about their fate.

The vast majority of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s more than 6,000 employees are employed at its headquarters and rocket factory in Hawthorne, California, and hundreds of others are based in Seattle, Florida, Washington, D.C. and Texas. Some 577 positions will be cut in Hawthorne, Jan Vogel, executive director of the South Bay Workforce Investment Board, said in an interview Sunday.

Those cut include production managers, avionics technicians, machinists, inventory specialists and propulsion technicians.