NASA Runs Low on Young Talent

NASA’s workforce 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 helped lead the panel of aerospace industry experts who wrote the report.

NASA hired 411 new engineers in 2005, about 4% of the 10,700 engineers at the agency. Three-quarters of NASA’s engineers and scientists are older than 40, and by 2011, close to half of its scientists and more than a quarter of its engineers will be eligible for retirement, the report noted.