NASA gets away with blatant age discrimination AND Some reader feedback.

The loss of the Columbia Space Shuttle has given rise to questions about the competency of NASA. Unlike movie heroine Stella, NASA is having a hard time getting its groove back.

In the early days of the space race, I had a lot of contact with people at NASA and had deep respect for them. Today, all my friends and acquaintances directly employed by NASA are gone, and my pipeline is now second-hand information from NASA contractors. What I hear is disturbing.

For openers, NASA is concerned that its workforce of engineers is aging and losing expertise through retirements. But paradoxically, for the most part it refuses to hire seasoned engineers in midcareer who have been cut loose by defense contractors and very much would like to get hired by NASA. The agency is largely replacing retirees with kids just out of school who bring nothing in the way of experience, and they sometimes lack good judgment.

In addition (and here I know the forces of political correctness will excoriate me, but it must be said), NASA has been tripping over its feet striving too hard for diversity. It wants to have a workforce that "looks like America." The problem is that a workforce that looks like America might end up being about as smart as America, which means NASA won't have many bona fide rocket scientists in its ranks.

Another troubling thing is that "a workforce that looks like America" has come to represent code words for: "White middle-aged males need not apply." It has been said NASA is trying to shake the image that it is populated by guys with crew cuts wearing white shirts and neckties.

Age discrimination, however, seems to be endemic to the entire aerospace industry. The CEO of one prominent aerospace company says his firm and others in the business "fill the front end with people right out of school." They do this even though, he admits, it often makes aerospace companies repeat the mistakes they have made earlier. Increasingly, there is no more tribal lore to help avoid catastrophes.

One middle-aged engineer with highly impressive technical credentials has shown me an exchange of e-mails he has had with the human-resources department at a NASA installation. The paper trail reveals a bureaucratic nightmare reeking of blatant age discrimination. To protect my source, I am going to be vague about details, but you'll get the drift of what is going on.

The first document is a job posting from NASA requiring an experienced individual to do exceedingly sophisticated work in a particular engineering specialty. The next document is a copy of his application, which includes a work history that fits the position precisely.

So far so good. But then he received a letter from NASA rejecting him for a different job for which he hadn't even applied. So he sent NASA a letter pointing out the error.

That brought a response that was a masterpiece of obfuscation. The significant thing is that it kept mentioning repeatedly that NASA was trying to fill its positions with people who were "fresh out," meaning fresh out of college. In other words, the agency wasn't going to consider anyone who was middle aged. In my opinion, this stance seems not only to be illegal but also may shed light on why NASA is losing technical competency.

The editorial in our July 10, 2003 issue talked about blatant age discrimination at NASA. We received a lot of mail in response, and it is so revealing about discrimination throughout industry it deserves its own column. Here is the best of it, some of which you may have already read in Point & Counterpoint.

-I worked for NASA in the 1990s during the Clinton years when the agency became mainly a jobs program for women and minorities. There was more emphasis on making NASA look like America than in accomplishing anything. Service contracts were taken away from competent firms and placed with set-aside firms owned by minorities. Whenever we bought anything, we had to spend time looking for a minority-owned business to place an order, even if it were at double the price. I quit when my supervisor told me I would never be promoted to management because I was a white guy.

-I have a degree in electronic engineering and am a contractor serving as lead engineer supervising a team of contractor and NASA engineers. All my subordinates are under 26 years old and don't know enough to be dangerous. The NASA engineers are a lazy lot, yet it is difficult for NASA employees to get laid off or fired. By the way, an example of kids doing work over their heads was the analysis of foam damage before the loss of the Shuttle.

-What you wrote about was the policy of the former head of NASA, who told a workforce meeting at the Johnson Space Center that NASA was "too male, too pale, too stale." (His exact words, later edited out of a video transcript of the meeting.) Your observations and concerns are very well placed, and aside from the Shuttle disaster, there was the 1999 Mars debacle. Four spacecraft were lost because a young, cheap, inexperienced, and loosely supervised team made classic mistakes in judgment.

-The NASA workforce has unfortunately become a microcosm of the entire technically challenged American population. I'm a seasoned engineer who has watched this development with despair. Back in 1994, one of the managers in the Space Station project challenged contractor Boeing to lower payroll costs 5% per year by hiring young engineers at lower salaries.

-With regard to age discrimination at NASA, what else is new? I work in the private sector and during 30 years worked my way up in design engineering, eventually becoming chief engineer and serving in that capacity for five years before being laid off. The owner admitted that a good part of my being let go was that my wife and I were both 51 years old and causing the firm to pay higher premiums for health insurance.

-Age discrimination is not just a problem with NASA but is nationwide. The only middle-aged engineers I see being hired are contract workers.

-You could have substituted the name of my employer for NASA in your column. Our female former chief information officer told us there would be no more "over-50, white-male thinking" in our information-technology department.

-In my private-sector job, I once was given the assignment of recruiting a chemical engineer. I was told I could interview anyone but that I would have to hire a black female. The company was under pressure to change its workforce so that it "looked like America." I was forced to turn down many excellent candidates because they didn't fit the color-gender requirement.

-You had the courage to say in public what my circle of colleagues has been saying privately for years. The automotive business has long been following the same abysmal path. Ford specifically made a point of bringing youth and diversity into the business, and look where it is today. My company is going in the same direction despite the fact that we have to give more and more technical support to the technically destitute engineering staffs of GM, Ford, and Chrysler.

We all know NASA is an increasing leftist institution. This shows it.

Those laws don’t apply to us! Do as we say not as we do!

There are many more great letters from readers on this subject. In the Sept. 18th paper issue. But I don’t think there are available online.

An engineering degree is useless. Education begins after school ends. It takes at least five years experience in a challenging R & D environment for a sharp graduate to begin to be an engineer. If a person works in a non-challenging environment, they never become an engineer.

Lt me add the following understated comment. I read shit like this and I become even more disgusted with this degenerate country.

Interesting article. And "tribal lore" is the reason for much of the confusion in the business world as well as the engineering field.

My auntie worked for NACA then NASA for 35 years----a brilliant aeroengineer. I worked for Nasa for 5 years...and found that the things that made NASA such a great place to be an engineer in the eraly years had all gone away. These days NASA is all too sensitive to COngress and the public...and by te by those foam tiles experienced the same type of damage on their first wind tunnel tests...took out a brand neww 50,000 HP motor...Ah things ain't wat they used to be

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