COLORADO SPRINGS, CO -- The U.S. government needs to fund bold new space projects if its aerospace industry is to continue to attract the "best and brightest" young engineers and scientists to its ranks, executives from several of the largest aerospace companies said Tuesday.
Speaking at the 19th National Space Symposium here, senior executives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, and Northrop Grumman Space Technologies presented a sober assessment of an industry that is seeing new graduates pass it by even as large numbers of its employees prepare to retire.
It is also an industry that has seen both its commercial and government sales decline in recent years and has watched many companies either shuttering manufacturing facilities or exiting the business altogether.
This dilemma has aerospace executives worried about an industry that is vital to U.S. national security and economic well being.
Al Smith, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, said that when it comes the U.S. military might, technology is every bit as important as the quality of the troops themselves and their training and tactics. But the technology will not continue to be there if the health and well being of the U.S. aerospace industry is not improved.
Government procurement reform, new incentives for internal research and development efforts and shedding the industry's excess manufacturing capacity is all part of the prescription for a healthier industrial base, Smith and other executives said. But bold new projects must also be part of the regimen if the U.S. aerospace industry is to reclaim its position as an exciting place to work.
As Smith put it, new graduates aren't keen to join an industry that appears to be in decline.
And the cuts may not be over. Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. George Muellner, senior vice president of Air Force systems at Boeing, said industry executives need to remove their "rose colored glasses" and "start aggressively adapting to this [current business] environment." In other words, shut down the plants that are no longer needed so that the industry can emerge financially healthier.
"We as industry need to rationalize that industrial base and infrastructure to get profitability back in the equation," Muellner said.
Wes Bush, president of Northrop Grumman Space Technologies, said enticing new graduates to the field early is going to be critical to replacing the industries veterans as they retire. "If we capture people out of school, they tend to stay in the industry," he said.
New projects, Bush said, could help reverse the trend and bring new scientists and engineers into the industry.
"Technology attracts the best and the brightest," he said.
On that count, there is cause for hope, according to retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Thomas Moorman, vice president of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
"We are replacing virtually all legacy systems in the national security space inventory and introducing three new systems" including a space-based space surveillance system to track orbital debris and a space based radar system, Moorman said. The Pentagon is also in the early stages of preparing to replace all of its in space communications assets with nine new satellites that will serve military and civil needs.
Concurrently, Moorman pointed out, NASA is developing the James Webb Space Telescope to replace the Hubble, getting ready to build an Orbital Space Plane to ferry crew and cargo to the international space station, as well as kicking off Project Prometheus, an $8 billion-plus effort to build a nuclear-powered Jupiter-bound spacecraft.
Northrop Grumman's Bush agreed that the challenging projects on the horizon could help sove some of the workforce problems. "As we look at replacing our infrastructure ... I truly believe that helps us address the workforce issues," he said.
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