NASA Trying to Reverse Brain Drain

A swashbuckling engineer sounds like a sublime oxymoron, but that’s how Jack Jansen saw himself back in the ‘70s. In another division of Rockwell Corp., some poor saps spent their days building parking meters. Jansen was building rocket engines that would push America’s newest spaceship into orbit.

“That was real engineering ... heady stuff,” said Jansen, who worked for NASA contractors for 45 years. “We were making very significant decisions on how the space shuttle needed to work.”

But by the time Jansen retired in 1997, the program had become an exercise in garage mechanics, not the stuff of revolution. “It was down to maintenance,” Jansen said. “The excitement level was way, way down. It was a completely different type of program.”

Six years later, NASA is in a desperate squeeze -- and struggling for relevance.

With no “space race” to dangle in front of recruits, unable to compete with the allure of dot-com salaries and trapped in a rut between major advances in space travel, NASA has had a hard time over the last decade attracting and keeping young engineers and scientists. According to government records, NASA employees older than 60 now outnumber those younger than 30 by about 3 to 1. And a quarter of the agency’s payroll will be eligible to retire within five years.

At the same time, mostly to save money, the space agency has reduced its workforce by 22%, from 25,000 to 19,500, since 1993. It has bought out many older employees and, as a result, suffers from a “brain drain” that auditors believe forces the few young engineers it can enlist into jobs for which they are not ready.

It is a terrible recipe, some believe, for the future of American space exploration.

On Jan. 30, the General Accounting Office -- Congress’ investigative arm -- released records showing that NASA’s work force was understaffed and under duress. Its “ability to perform future missions ... may be at risk” because of shortages in key skill areas.

Two days later, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated.

“We won the moon race, and the biggest surge of funding for manned spaceflight began to trail off,” said Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank that tracks the defense and aerospace industries. “Then the better, cheaper, faster replacement spacecraft -- the space shuttle -- blows up in 1986. Then the Cold War ends, which deflates the demand for military and intelligence satellites.

“It’s one trauma after another,” Thompson said. “Every time the [space] sector tries to get secure footing, it is hit by some development that reduces the attractiveness of a career in the field. A generation of engineers have gone elsewhere.”

It wasn’t always that way. Not so long ago, NASA was daring, sexy, cutting-edge.

The bar code swiped at the grocery store? NASA developed that technology to keep track of millions of parts in storage facilities across the nation. The ear thermometer that lets doctors determine body temperature without probing less pleasant places? Patients thank their lucky stars for that one, and they should: NASA inspired that too, using infrared technology developed to track the changing universe.

But at 45 years old, NASA has tapped out its dreams -- in the public’s mind anyway. After landing a man on the moon, America developed its Skylab program, then its space shuttle program. And then NASA effectively stalled. Many of the engineers still around say they are weary of devoting their days to keeping 20-year-old spaceships aloft -- and troubled, in the case of Columbia, by the prospect of failing at that charge.

Granted, some changes at the agency have been beyond its control.

With the end of the Cold War, for instance, NASA could no longer offer competition with the Soviet Union and other nations to draw recruits.

Then in the 1990s, it couldn’t compete with the paychecks being handed out by telecommunications companies and high-tech start-ups.

Last month, the GAO determined that hiring freezes and a lack of qualified scientists and engineers had created substantial staffing shortages in critical NASA divisions, including flight-software engineering and electrical engineering.

Gary Coen, 62, went to work for NASA in 1964 during its Apollo program. When he retired in 1995, he was the head of the agency’s Russia project office -- meaning he had arrived at the heyday of the space race and departed with a title requiring him to coordinate space exploration with the country that once was America’s chief rival.

“In the 1960s, we were sending people to the moon.... We had no problem attracting people,” Coen said last week. In his view, NASA’s current problems come down to money.

The agency’s budget has hovered around $15 billion in recent years -- not enough to keep pace once the development of the international space station compounded NASA’s responsibilities.

By 1995, the agency came searching for employees at the top of the pay scale. Coen was targeted for a buyout, he said, because he made too much money.

“They offered a lot of older people incentives to get out,” he said. “Our problems were with losing experience.... I remember going to meetings where people would holler about the problems and the retention of skills.”

Some believe the brain drain that has plagued NASA, and the other personnel problems the aerospace industry has suffered, are beginning to ebb thanks to the dot-com bust.

Although young scientists and engineers were lured by high-tech companies just a few years ago, now they are looking for “old-fashioned security,” said Derek Cheung, president of Thousand Oaks-based Rockwell Scientific Co. -- a successor to the Rockwell empire, much of which has been taken over by Boeing.

“The free market has a built-in self-correction,” Cheung said. “Things are beginning to even out now. There is a cycle, and young people, they value job security a lot more now.”

But the wheels of government turn more slowly than those in the private sector, and NASA has a way to go before it starts to see the upturn in that cycle, analysts say. Still, there are signs that the space agency will recover.

John Hong worked at Rockwell for 14 years -- first on its technical staff, later as a manager and the director of electronics. Then three years ago, he couldn’t hold out any longer. Hong left Rockwell to help start a high-tech company called Acelo Semiconductor Inc. The Oxnard-based company specialized in 40-gigabyte computer chips that were the “hottest thing,” he said.

“It gave me a unique opportunity. There was a big potential upside for compensation as well, of course, if things went well,” Hong said.

They didn’t.

In what has become a common tale, the demand for the 40-gig chips dried up. Acelo went under. And Hong, now 42, went back to work in the aerospace industry -- this time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the agency’s lead center for the robotic exploration of space. There he is working on the development of successors to the Hubble Space Telescope and other technology, machines that might soon offer the world its most detailed look at the origins of the universe.

“I made the big switch,” Hong said. “And the technology being developed here is absolutely phenomenal.”

Many believe that NASA will regain its relevance among young, talented scientists and engineers only if begins to think big again.

That process appears to be underway. There is renewed discussion, for example, about exploration of Mars and, potentially, Jupiter. And Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.), whose district includes Kennedy Space Center, said he would like to see NASA pursue a replacement for the space shuttle system --vehicles that would double as taxis, ferrying crew members back and forth from the international space station.

“The shuttle was a 1970s program,” Weldon said in an interview last week. “And we haven’t really had anything new since then. If you want to start drawing young people into the program, you’ve got to have something to entice them, to intrigue them. We need a bigger vision. We have to get young people jazzed.”

NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, meanwhile, has formed a plan to secure more freedom in hiring his staff, with the aim of drawing fresh talent.

Jim Tingwald, a human resource management specialist at NASA’s Washington headquarters, said O’Keefe’s proposal includes pay bonuses for high performers -- a controversial notion among federal employees. O’Keefe is awaiting approval from Congress before making those changes.

Ultimately, however, big plans require big money -- and that may be hard to come by.

Money, when it comes to Congress, comes down to votes.

“The problem the program faces is that it doesn’t have much electoral traction. Everybody loves it. But not to the extent that they will pay for it,” said Thompson, the Lexington Institute analyst.

“At election time, it’s hard to turn the space program into votes. And that is the bottom line. A generation ago, mankind’s surge into the cosmos was at the cutting edge of science. That’s just not the case anymore. Science switched from the cosmos to the microcosmos, to atoms and cells. The scientific community turned away from the stars. So did everybody else.”

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Times staff writers Eric Malnic in Houston and Aaron Zitner in Washington contributed to this report.