COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The U.S. space industry is losing critical skills and talent and is on a “downward trend,” said Gen. C. Robert Kehler, the leader of Air Force Space Command.
Engineers and other technical experts — once plentiful in the heydays of NASA and the space race — are growing harder to find.
That’s “not to say they don’t produce amazing products with incredible capabilities — they do … but there are issues that we have to be mindful of,” Kehler said at the Space Symposium here.
Futurist and author Alvin Toffler said the United States is losing its edge when it comes to a field it once dominated. It’s not exclusively an American world anymore, he said. “It’s a Chinese world. It’s an Indian world.
“We’re going to have to get used to the fact that we’re not going to be number one anymore. For a long time, we had no number two,” Toffler said.
A wave of retirements in the space community has been predicted for many years. Alarms about the shortage of engineers, scientists and other technical experts from the baby boomer generation have sounded for a decade or more.
The only bright spot — if it can be called that — is that some of the these space technologists are putting off their retirement due to the sharp drop in the value of their pensions and 401K accounts during the past year.
“With the 401K issues, we see a lot of people postponing their retirements,” said Wesley Covell, president of defense programs at Harris Corp.’s government communications systems division, Melbourne, Fla.
But that would be a temporary respite, he said. “I’m very concerned about science and technology and our ability to do this type of work in the long term,” he said.
Aggravating the situation is the government’s slow acquisition process, many vendors at the conference pointed out.
Kehler told reporters that the decline of the U.S. space industrial base is having some concrete effects on the nation’s capabilities. The slowdown in work has caused some second- and third-tier suppliers to leave the business. They are eventually replaced by less experienced companies.
“The fact of the matter is, until they get more experience, we sometimes see parts fail. That delays us, [and] causes us problems,” he said.
And in space, failed parts can’t be replaced as easily as a broken transmission on a truck. A failed part may mean a malfunctioning multi-million dollar satellite.
Space Command has had to be more vigilant with the quality of these secondary suppliers, he said.
Lt. Gen. John T. Sheridan, commander of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Center in Los Angeles, said one-third of the center’s civilian workforce is eligible to retire by 2010. That will create a shortage of middle managers, he said. But again, the poorly performing economy is having an unintended consequence.
“For many years, it’s been pretty difficult to hire government civilians in L.A. because of the better paying contractor jobs out there,” he said. “The current state of the economy has actually helped us to attract new, experienced individuals into our workforce,” he added.
The Space Foundation’s 2009 annual report notes that the United States has “first rate technical schools and universities and flagship public universities offering aerospace engineering degrees in all 50 states, yet despite these strengths, the United States … potentially faces a diminishing pool of indigenous talent. Older aerospace employees who retire are not being replaced by new recruits at a sustainable rate.”
Because space programs are so costly, the governments of space-faring nations continue to drive programs that attract professionals into the field, the report noted.
As for the United States, total government spending on space programs is edging up, the foundation reported. The 2008 budget was estimated at $66.63 billion, an increase from $62.55 billion in 2007. Since the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office’s budgets are classified, these are only estimates, the report noted.
Eric Rhodes, business development manager at BAE Systems’ Merrimack, N.H. division, said he doesn’t totally agree that the United States is going to be bypassed by other nations in the space realm. “There are some players out there that are certainly closing the gap a little bit, but we certainly have a considerable lead over everyone else.”
However, “there are very specialized capabilities that are needed to engineer, build and produce space equipment,” he added. Work is becoming less frequent. “We’re doing this at a slow enough level so that we’re seeing gaps.”
Both the military and intelligence space sectors have poor acquisition records. Satellites have routinely come in over budget and late. The Defense Department has instituted a series of reforms, which Air Force officials at the symposium said, are beginning to produce results. However, budget concerns loom.
The Transformational-Satellite, or T-Sat, may be the latest victim of the inefficient procurement process. T-Sat was intended to provide high-bandwidth mobile communications to troops on the ground. Long singled out by the Government Accountability Office as a troubled and overpriced program, it made Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ list of new technologies that he believes should fall to the budget ax. His proposal would add two Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites to a constellation of four to make up for the loss of T-Sat. If Congress approves the proposed cut, it will be one less space program under development that will provide work for the industry.
Covell said T-Sat’s cancellation would “have a significant impact on the defense industrial base if that goes away, because that’s a significant number of jobs and opportunities that won’t be there for development.”
Rhodes said the answer is not creating busy work for space contractors. “We have to be much more surgical. We only have to do what we have to do,” he said. Some hard questions need to be asked, he said. What areas need to keep going? What needs support?
There is money flowing to two sectors. One is the operationally responsive space concept. The idea calls for launchers and satellites that can be deployed more quickly than the current cumbersome system. The other is space situational awareness. A Chinese anti-satellite test in January 2007 — followed this January by the collision of an Iridium communications satellite with a Russian spacecraft in low-earth orbit — has highlighted the need for the Air Force to have a better understanding of what is happening beyond Earth.
Executives at the symposium confirmed that there were new space protection programs in the works, but much of it remains classified.
As far as the expensive and risky world of launching spacecraft, operationally responsive space is providing some activity. The plan calls for sending small satellites to orbit within hours or days, instead of months or years, as is the current practice.
At least one startup vying for Air Force contracts is breathing life into the field. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — also known as Space X — was founded by billionaire Elon Musk in 2002 and was then nothing more than an office in El Segundo, Calif. Four years later, the company launched its first rocket.
Another startup, Air Launch, based in Kirkland, Wash., wants to send payloads into space from the back of transport aircraft. Despite the entrepreneurial spirit behind the programs, both firms see the government as a prime customer and used Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding to prove their concepts.
Air Launch failed to obtain enough government contracts to remain in business. The company is currently in “hibernation,” the trade publication Space News reported.
Mark Mimovich, New Mexico Operations Manager for CSA Engineering, works for a second-tier space parts manufacturer. It makes vibration dampeners and other devices that fly aboard rockets and satellites.
“The business that we’ve been conducting for operationally responsive space has accelerated rather than declined,” he said. Other sectors seem to be stagnant, he added.
Unlike other space parts makers that have gone under, CSA has survived by diversifying. It has taken some of the pumps it developed for on-orbit propulsion, and transformed them into devices that can automatically deliver medicine to patients in hospitals.
Barron Beneski, spokesman for Orbital Sciences, Dulles, Va., which specializes in small satellites and launchers, said, “we’re hiring. And one of the areas we’re hiring for is military space.”
There is a trend toward smaller launch systems and satellites, and there’s work for companies such as Orbital, he said.
“There will always be big satellites — the laws of physics demands certain things — but in certain cases smaller satellites work really well,” he said.
As far as big launch programs — such as those that fueled the demand for rocket scientists in the 1960s and 1970s — “there is no big development program out there,” said Jeff Jensen, director of marketing and business development for Pratt & Whitney’s Rocketdyne division, Canoga Park, Calif.
“Trying to entice people to come to the workforce is difficult,” he said. Programs have steadily declined since the 1960s.
Workhorse rockets such as the Delta and Atlas are mature programs, he noted.
The J-2 rocket engine being built for NASA is closest to a program that currently occupies design and development engineers, he said. The engine, which will power NASA’s Ares 1 launch vehicle, is intended to replace the Space Shuttle. A second rocket program, the Ares 5 heavy launcher, may one day send astronauts to the moon or Mars.
However, Bryan Kidder, director of communications for Pratt & Whitney, noted that these are not new rockets, but enhanced versions of legacy systems.
The Ares 5’s RS-68 engine comes from the Delta 4 program. The J-2 is an Apollo-era engine from the Saturn series of rockets. These new versions do provide some work for rocket scientists, but that will tail off in the coming years.
Air Force and NASA officials have complained for years that there needs to be a cheaper and more cost effective way to send payloads into orbit.
That is a tough problem engineers need to crack, Kidder said. “We’re fighting that equation of cost versus risk. How can you provide dependable quality at a lower cost?”
That is especially true for human space flight where systems need to be more robust, and are therefore more expensive.
“How can we use the entrepreneurial nature of our employees — especially the new hires coming in — and translate that into ways to help our customers save money?” Kidder asked.
Space-X believes it can manufacture rockets at a lower price. It did eventually garner NASA and Air Force contracts, and now says it offers one of the “best environments in the world for engineers to learn, build real working systems and assume significant leadership roles,” according to its website. It employs about 550 workers.
The nation lacks a unified space policy and a roadmap for the future. Such a plan would make young engineers see that there is a future working in the field, Jensen said. “We would want to plan what we’re going to do and execute what we’re going to do,” Jensen said. “That makes space a more attractive career.”
Then younger generations of engineers and scientists can see there are opportunities, he added.
“Their cell phones probably have more computing power than the Apollo capsule did, so their expectations are greater,” Kidder said.