HELP WANTED
Daniel Goldin
The Atlantic Monthly
September 2001
The head of NASA forecasts a bleak future for American
science
In 1999 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
suffered two setbacks in its exploration of Mars. In September the $125 million
Mars Climate Orbiter, designed to gather in- formation about terrain and
climate, was lost in spare. In December the $165 million Mars Polar Lander,
the Orbiter's sister craft, apparently crashed into the planet's surface.
NASA does not have a legacy of failure, even in its ambitious Mars program
(the Mars Global Surveyor, a probe launched in 1996, and the Mars Pathfinder,
which landed in 1997, were both resounding successes). As the administrator
of NASA, I was eager to investigate why these accidents happened. I was disturbed
by what I found.
As always, we had very dedicated, intelligent people at
NASA. But we did not have enough of them, nor did they have all the
experience they needed. Only 700 or so scientists and engineers worked on
the two 1999 Mars missions — about the same number that had worked on the
Pathfinder mission alone. Many of our veteran scientists and engineers had
retired and weren't available to train or mentor the few young people we
had hired to replace them. And the situation will get worse: currently
NASA has twice as many employees over sixty as under thirty.
These problems, of course, are not confined to NASA; they
reflect nation-wide trends. In the years to come members of the science and
engineering work force, along with other members of the national work force,
will be retiring at an ever increasing rate. Our most experienced workers
will be leaving at a time when our need for them is greatest. The United
States is expected to create about two million additional jobs in science
and engineering by the end of the decade-an increase in demand of more than
50 percent. If we do not graduate enough students in those fields during
that time, the country will be faced with a serious deficit of scientists
and engineers.
The country will also be faced with an evaporating dominance.
In the 1960s and 1970s the United States was un- equaled in aerospace and
technology. In the 1980s and 1990s the rest of the world began to close the
gap. Now NASA engineers, traveling throughout the world, have concluded that
the technical infrastructure supporting the European aircraft industry is,
for the first time, equal to ours. More important, Europe is climbing upward
while we are sliding downward. In the mid-1980s the United States received
70 percent of all new orders for commercial aircraft. Today it receives 55
percent.
American students, meanwhile, seem to be losing interest
in technical careers — from 1983 to 1997 enrollment in undergraduate engineering
programs decreased by 19 percent. Much of the problem is simply
demographic: from 1980 to 2000 the U.S. college-age population dropped
by more than 21 percent, from 21.6 million to 17 million. But
although that population will increase in the next decade, we must still
worry about the shifting focus of students. In 1986 college students earned
about 24,000 degrees in electrical engineering and about 5,000 degrees in
parks, recreation. leisure, and fitness. In 1996, they earned nearly 14,000
degrees in each of these fields. Only two years later 4,000 more students
were earning degrees in parks, recreation. leisure, and fitness than in electrical
engineering.
My concern is not that we have too much leisure in this
country but that we are losing talented young people from an industry critical
to our global competitiveness and national defense. Right now we are relatively
secure. But what's going to happen in the century to come?
Will we lead a recreation program for the world?