CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida
(AP) - NASA's work force is graying and the agency lacks a long-term plan for
luring qualified workers to help send astronauts to the moon and Mars, a
National Research Council report says.
"NASA doesn't have a lot of
people leaving, so what's been happening is they're aging in place,'' said MIT
aeronautics professor Daniel Hastings, who co-chaired the panel of aerospace
industry experts who wrote the report.
The space
agency has been too focused on short-term labor problems, such as what to do
with some 900 employees whose work is ending along with the soon-to-be-retired space
shuttle, the experts wrote. There has not been enough attention on the type of
skills needed in the future and the aging of the work force, they said.
"They actually don't have a
strategy,'' said Hastings. "They're too focused on the short term.''
NASA requested the report
last year from the research council, a nonprofit organization that is part of
the National Academies of Science, which offer policy advice under
congressional charter. A final version of the report will come out in early
2007.
NASA spokesman Doc Mirelson
said the space agency would reserve commenting on the interim report until
making a formal response Monday at a meeting with the panel.
The report noted that NASA
does not regularly hire workers straight out of college because of the
extensive training needed and prefers engineers and scientists with some
experience.
"They like to hire people
in their 30s ... at a little more mature stage of their careers,'' said
panelist John Douglass, president and CEO of the Aerospace Industries
Association. "Growing people straight out of college is kind of what industry
does.''
The report urges the agency
to use personnel exchanges with academia and the private sector to bring in new
blood rather than training recent graduates. Many young engineers and
scientists don't view NASA as an exciting place to work, the report said.
NASA's 18,400 workers,
along with the tens of thousands of contract employees, face the end of the space
shuttle program in 2010 and the development of next-generation
vehicles that will allow astronauts to go back to the moon and eventually
explore Mars. The two projects require different skill sets, forcing NASA to
keep space shuttle workers in place, while at the same time designing, building
and testing new vehicles.
The lack of major turnover
at the space agency has added to the aging of the work force and the lack of
younger employees. NASA only hired 411 new engineers in 2005, or about 4
percent of the 10,700 engineers at the agency. Only a quarter of NASA's
engineers and scientists are under age 40, and by 2011 the agency predicts that
close to half of its scientists and more than a quarter of its engineers will
be eligible for retirement, the report noted.
The panel found no evidence
of a shortage of aerospace scientists and engineers as had been forecast for
the industry but agreed that NASA was having trouble finding some workers, such
as system engineers and project managers.
"I thought they would have
jumped on this a little sooner,'' Ray Haynes, an official at Northrop Grumman Space
Technology who served on the panel, said of the agency's lack of a work force
strategy. "Better later than not at all.''
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