posted 02-11-2003 04:07 PM
NASA Trying to Reverse Brain Drain
After a decade of difficulty attracting recruits, agency aims to hire fresh talentLos Angeles Times 02/11/03
author: Scott Gold
Copyright 2001 / The Times Mirror Company
HOUSTON -- 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.
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[edited due to copyright concerns]
[This message has been edited by collectSPACE Admin (edited February 11, 2003).]
posted 02-11-2003 04:07 PM
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