When did young people stop working at NASA?

Every NASA administrator in the last 10 years has called for new blood in the organization and worried about the looming percentage of the workforce that would be eligible to retire in the next five years.

These retirees contain valuable knowledge on how to launch and prepare spacecraft that could be lost during the retirement of the space shuttle and the suspected delays to its replacement, the Ares constellation program.

In evidence presented to House Subcommittees on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and District of Columbia earlier this week, Gregory J. Junemann, President of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers gave a report “Public Service in the 21st Century: An Examination of the State of the Federal Workforce ” that touched in particular on the large scarcity of young NASA staff members compared to the early 1990s, a proportion of which left the organization, leaving it understaffed in young to middle-age management expertise for the foreseeable future.

“The consequences for NASA’s long-term health are dire,” said Junemann, “NASA must reverse course in President Obama’s first term or key intellectual capabilities will be lost and not replaced.”

“Between 1993 and 2009, despite the fact that NASA’s overall budget and responsibilities increased, NASA lost 6,787 civil-servant employees under the age of 40, who were never replaced (see purple oval for missing cohort). Without a course correction, the demographic distribution will become even more skewed with the proportion of NASA employees who are 50-59 increasing to nearly half the entire civil-service workforce by the 2014.”

Paul Guinnessy