IUKA - Alliant Techsystems announced Friday it has canceled plans to add 600 jobs to its Tishomingo County facility.

The plans called for ATK to invest at least $200 million in upgrading its location in Iuka to make it ready for an expansion. The company also was supposed to provide an average salary of $53,000 for the 800 employees.

The facility and its employees primarily support the production of large composite aerospace structures for government and commercial launch vehicles.

In a statement released Friday afternoon by the Mississippi Development Authority, ATK officials cited the "recent downturn in the economy and the company's need to consolidate its engineering, development and production of the Airbus program."

"The State of Mississippi is extremely disappointed by ATK's decision to cancel the Tishomingo County project and to cancel its plans to create higher paying, composite technology jobs in Iuka," Gov. Haley Barbour said in a prepared statement.

In February 2009, ATK announced plans to build composite structures for commercial aircraft at its plant at the Tri-State Industrial Park at Yellow Creek near Iuka.

The plant, which employed 176 people at the time, was scheduled to increase its work force to 800 within eight years. If completed, it would have been the county's largest employer.

But on Friday, ATK said instead of locating its Airbus A350 full rate production operations to Iuka, it will centralize them at an undisclosed, existing location.

Company officials have indicated they do not believe this decision will affect the current 160 employees at ATK's Iuka facility, the press release said.

ATK has more than 18,000 employees in 22 states, Puerto Rico and internationally.

MDA said ATK has reimbursed the state in full for the more than $30 million in economic development incentives made available to the company.

As part of the agreement to lure the company to expand, the state was to issue $25 million in bonds. Tishomingo County was to issue $5 million in bonds that were expected to be paid back through tax revenue from the plant.

The disappointing situation unfortunately has happened before in the county.

In the late 1970s and '80s, Tishomingo County was supposed to be the site of a new Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power plant that would bring good-paying jobs. That project was abandoned, as was a plan to build advanced solid rocket motors for NASA in the early 1990s.

Both the power plant and the rocket motor plant were slated for the current location of the Tri-State Industrial Park, and several buildings were constructed to house those projects.

ATK is currently using one of those buildings and was expected to use more existing space at Tri-State for the now-canceled expansion.

Contact Carlie Kollath at (662) 678-1598 or carlie.kollath@djournal.com. Daily Journal Jackson Bureau writer Bobby Harrison contributed to this story.