One of the many reasons given for reorienting NASA away from the space shuttle and International Space Station and toward missions to the moon and Mars is the supposed need for some "grand challenge" to excite students into becoming engineers of all types but particularly electrical engineers. Apparently this is a real problem, not just political propaganda to bolster the case for going to Mars. As a General Accounting Office report from last summer put it:
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Currently, the average age of NASA's workforce is over 45, and 15 percent of NASA's science and engineering employees are eligible to retire; within 5 years, about 25 percent will be retirement eligible. At the same time, the agency is finding it difficult to hire people with science, engineering, and information technology skills—fields critical to NASA's missions. Within the science and engineering workforce, the over-60 population currently outnumbers the under-30 population nearly 3 to 1. As the pool of scientists and engineers shrinks, competition for these workers intensifies.
If you want further proof of this apparently worrisome trend, look no further than your local Radio Shack. In a recent E-mail to Electronic Design magazine, Forrest Mims—author of most of Radio Shack's electronics project books—reports that the rapid disappearance of the electronics hobbyist has caused Radio Shack to drop all of its electronics project books. "Electronics training is in trouble in the U.S., and hobby electronics is in a free fall," Mims concludes. Perhaps all is not completely gloomy, though. The proliferation of "battling robot" shows on cable must mean that at least someone out there still likes to tinker with technology.
