On the heels of yesterday’s announcement that NASA wants to erect living quarters on the moon, NASA officials and aerospace industry executives are holding a recruiting reception tonight for college students and young professionals. The target audience is those students who might eventually lead the lunar exploration program planned for 2020.
The reception, sponsored by Northrop Grumman (NGC), Booz Allen Hamilton and SpaceX, is being held with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space Exploration Conference in Houston, which runs Dec. 4 through Dec. 6.
Pete Worden, the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, will make a brief presentation, as will a few senior managers from the aerospace sector, including Alan Ladwig, NGC manager for NASA and civil space programs in Integrated Systems who worked at NASA until 1999 as the associate administrator for policy and plans.
The hosts are hopeful that the event will attract college students nationwide and young professionals currently working in the aerospace community.
“It's always my highlight when I get to talk to them,” Ladwig said. “They have fresh ideas. They haven't been beat up by the system and they're the ones who are going to take over all this at some point. “
For NGC, tonight’s event is part of a larger initiative to guarantee that the nation’s future workforce has the science and engineering skills needed to pursue space exploration.
Recently, the company sent grade-school teachers aloft in a jet that performed parabolic maneuvers to generate moments of zero gravity. Last spring, NGC announced a three-year agreement to sponsor NASA's annual moonbuggy race, in which student engineering teams worldwide design, build and race a vehicle similar to the original lunar rover.
Many of those who laid the foundation for NASA’s space program and the aerospace industry will be retiring in the next five years, said Brooks McKinney, a spokesman for NGC Integrated Systems.
“The first person to walk on Mars is probably in grade school today, maybe kindergarten,” he said. “We need to find ways to make science, education and engineering cool subjects.”
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