A yearly Government Accountability Office report on NASA’s major projects outlined on Tuesday several challenges that the space agency faces, including cost growth and launch schedule delays. But the report also addressed a more complex topic: NASA’s aging workforce.
More than half of NASA’s workforce is 50 years old and over, marking a seven percent increase over the past five years, GAO said in its tenth annual report. 56 percent of NASA employees fall into that category. About 21 percent of NASA’s workforce (made up of 17,063 people) was eligible for retirement at the beginning of 2018, and on top of that, 23 percent will be qualified to retire in the next five years. Officials pointed to NASA’s low employee turnover rate (about four percent annually) as one reason for the trend.
NASA employees stay past their initial retirement eligibility date, on average, for four to seven years. The numbers vary according to specialization: The report stated that science and engineering staff stay on average for a little over seven years after they are eligible for retirement, whereas those in administrative roles are more likely to remain for an average of four years.
“Officials said there are both advantages and disadvantages to having an aging workforce. For example, human capital officials noted that having an aging workforce is good for maintaining institutional knowledge due to experienced staff staying longer, but that having a low attrition rate makes it more difficult for the agency to make changes to its workforce skill mix as needed,” said the report.
GAO added that NASA officials are considering options for being “more strategic” in hiring operations in order to meet the agency’s diverse skills needs.
“You need experienced people to mentor, but you also need fresh blood and ideas,” Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer, writer, and space policy expert told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
As a whole, 44.5 percent of the civilian federal workforce was 50 years old and up in 2015, according to a 2016 GAO report on engaging millennials and other age groups. The report compared the number of millennials in government positions to those in older age groups per agency in fiscal year 2014. The government-wide average of millennial staffers was 29.6 percent. Ranking 21st out of 25 agencies, NASA fell short of the average, with 22.4 percent. (In first place was the Department of Homeland Security, 39.2 percent of which was made up of millennials, which makes sense since the department is relatively young.)
Roger Launius, former chief historian at NASA, said in a phone interview Thursday that the trend reflects an aging of the workforce everywhere, not just at the agency. “Having said that, the workforce at NASA is aging from what it was during the Apollo era, and that’s been the case for a long time,” he said.
During the early years of NASA’s existence, the majority of hires were individuals who were fresh out of college. People who were already in the workforce had higher-level jobs and were making good money at Boeing and other companies, Launius said, and many of them weren’t jumping out of their seats to become civil servants. So when it came to expanding NASA for the Apollo program, “they typically hired a bunch of new college graduates.”
He added that it was not uncommon to see 30 to 35 year olds leading important branches of the agency during the 1960’s. “That same job today is usually filled by somebody who’s 50 years old, because they’ve been on the job a lot longer,” said Launius. “That’s just the nature of the aging of the workforce, I would contend, altogether.”
And although there are plenty of people who go to work for NASA today, there aren’t as many opportunities for young professionals. “You’ve got people who are in the workforce already and NASA’s not expanding,” he explained.
Young engineers and scientists see adventure in the innovative work being done by the private aerospace sector, and many of the people who would have gone to work for NASA during the Apollo era — “Going to the moon was a cool thing to do,” the historian reasoned — are today finding themselves at companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. But he argued the trend isn’t necessarily bad news for NASA.
“A wealth of experience is a good thing, and a person who’s got that is an asset,” he said. At the same time, however, someone could be stuck in their ways, trying to apply methods from 30 years ago to problems that may be more easily solved by recent technology. “It works both ways. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing altogether.”
