December 20, 2003
Julie Townsend: Mars Grrrrl

The Houston Chronicle is on a roll today. Here they profile one of NASA's young recruits, on whom the agency is pinning its hopes for the future.

The article contains the interesting factoid that NASA currently has three times as many employees over the age of sixty as it has under the age of thirty. On the one hand, it seems like it should be easy, as a young(ish) engineer with several years of experience in the space industry, to get a good job with NASA. On the other hand, I think of what that would entail -- civil service employment, GS scale pay, red tape, etc. -- and question whether it would be worth it.

Julie Townsend seems to think it is worthwhile, though.

Posted by T.L. James on December 20, 2003 09:35 PM

Comments

A similar situaton at the large aerospace company I work for. We have been directed to hire young engineers right out of college to try and close the gap.



Posted by: Rocket Man Blog at December 22, 2003 12:09 AM

Same with us.



Posted by: T.L. James at December 22, 2003 06:18 PM

On the Spirit Mission

Having looked at the messages above, I realize that I am off topic, but not knowing how to find the home page, I shall post this anyway.

Being a writer of fiction and personal essays, I may have a tendancy to be a bit overly prosaic at times. However, I find something deeply compelling about the thought of this small robotic emissary from earth sitting on that hauntingly beautiful Martian plain. Given the spare nature of the Martian atmosphere and lack of powerful erosive forces, I expect that the lander and the rover shall sit there for many centuries with little change in their appearance except for the accumulation of wind-borne dust on and about them.
Scientists will be mainly concerned about the information garnered from this mission, but it will be the poets and the writers who will sit awake in the late nights, thinking about that lonely place where a small relic of humanity sits silently, enduring the unimagineable loneliness of that far place while thin, alien winds whistle about it.
Yet, the same stars that shine above us shine down on that little bundle of machinery which was designed and built with such love and care out of the hopes and visions of us human dreamers. I sincerely hope that we never stop dreaming.



Posted by: Custis Long at January 4, 2004 10:32 PM