NASA faces looming engineer shortage

Ron Theis still remembers sitting in his boss's office explaining why he was leaving NASA after just two years: Excessive bureaucracy, low pay, and unmotivated co-workers were among his many frustrations.

His boss, well aware of NASA's need to recruit and keep young engineers, pleaded with the recent college grad to stay - even offering to help him find work anywhere in the space agency.

"There were some really interesting projects," Mr. Theis says. "I knew it would be fantastic [at first]. Then the same stuff would grind me back down again."

Theis is now a software engineer in the private sector, and his departure from NASA represents a looming crisis for the space agency. A General Accounting Office report last year found that NASA has three times as many engineers aged 60 and over as it has 30 and under - and a quarter of its nearly 19,000 employees will be eligible for retirement in five years.

Last month, the GAO again reported the agency is having difficulty hiring people with the science, engineering, and information-technology skills that are critical to its operations.

Experts warn that when retirees walk out the door, decades of knowledge and experience will walk out with them - slowing NASA's progress and raising additional safety concerns.

"It's one of the most serious problems at NASA right now," says Wei Shyy, chairman of the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at the University of Florida.

"They need to beef up their efforts to recruit young people and increase their pay. Then they need to find a way to retain the experience of those who are leaving," he says.

The reasons behind the graying of NASA engineers are many.

First, following a major hiring spree during the Apollo moon missions, new openings were severely limited by budget cuts during the late 1980s and early '90s. Add to that the dotcom boom, which pulled many young engineers away from space exploration and into the lucrative world of cyberspace.

In response, NASA officials say they are redoubling their efforts to get young people energized about space exploration.

In addition to coaxing astronauts to visit classrooms, the agency is funding elementary school science projects, sending student experiments into space, and creating more apprenticeships for talented high schooler and internships for college students.

"The educational mandate is an imperative," NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe testified before Congress last summer. "Our mission of understanding and protecting our home planet and exploring the universe and searching for life will not be carried out if we don't have the people to do it."

In classrooms at West Ashley High School in Charleston, S.C., the excitement of "The Right Stuff" years is being rekindled.

"When you do things like this Protein Crystallization Project, which was supposed to go up on the next shuttle, that's when you see the little fireworks going off in their heads," says science teacher Jeff Taylor, referring to a NASA-funded project that allows schoolchildren to send experiments into space.

"When they do something that goes up on a space shuttle, it makes them think, 'I'm a NASA scientist,' " he says.

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