When you hit the moon at age 11, the rest of your life isn’t going to be easy. Like a child prodigy, you’ve got that record to uphold, an achievement removed from the ordinary flow of time and displayed like a photograph at your mom’s house. It’d be perfectly understandable if you were in full crisis mode at mid-life: getting divorced, pining new cars, contemplating the meaning of life.
“At 50, you’re probably more than halfway done,” says NASA’s Wayne Hale, an even-keeled senior manager who recently left his job as shuttle program manager to help plot the agency’s course out of low-Earth orbit.
NASA plans to finish building the International Space Station in two years, retire the space shuttle fleet and develop new spaceships that can travel back to the moon and beyond.
“I think one of the things that motivates you is you think, ‘I probably have less runway ahead of me than behind, so now’s the time to really take stock of things: Do I want to drive in the NASCAR race or climb Mt. Ranier? You name it: What is your list of things you want to do before you’re done?
“People I think get reflective sometime in their late ‘40s or early ‘50s about what they want to do with life. You’ve got plenty of time ahead of you to make a significant change, but on the other hand you know there’s a limit there.
“I think the thing that really brings that home is that you look at your parents … many of us at this stage in our life our parents are getting to the age where they can’t do a lot of things that they would like to do. And you say, ‘You know, someday I’m going to be there, so I’m going to take advantage of what time I have before I get to that point.’ That motivates a lot of people and if that’s not in your thoughts when you’re late forties, early fifties, then you’re not paying attention.”
Caption: That's Wayne Hale on the right, with NASA administrator Mike Griffin on the left and press secretary David Mould between them scanning the skies above Kennedy Space Center hoping for a glimpse of the returning space shuttle Discovery last November.
Agencies aren’t human beings, of course, but they do have lifespans and life cycles, aspirations and reputations.
What bothers Hale about NASA’s turning 50 is the aging of its workforce.
“The average age of our employees is too high. We need young people, the excitement and the innovation they bring. We need more young people involved in the space program. That’s just all there is to it.
“If you look back at the glory days of what is generally Apollo, those guys were kids compared with where we are now. Yeah there were a few older and wiser folks around to keep them off some of the rocks, but basically we took some very young and energetic and excited people and gave them a large job and then stood back and watched them work. The agency needs to get back to that, I think, if we’re going to be successful.”
Fifty: The new 30
“In terms of an agency,” Hale continues, “We’re fairly young. Look at any of the other agencies in the government and they’re a lot older … the Department of the Interior and certainly the whole Defense establishment. A lot of the federal government expansion took place in the ‘30s and so as a federal agency coming into being in ’58 makes us one of the younger ones. From an institutional standpoint, you go through a period of growth and change, I’m sure, but it’s not the same as with human beings because the time scale is different and the capabilities are different.
“I would compare an agency at 50 to maybe someone in their late 20s, about to turn 30, who has just kind of gotten their feet wet in the work environment, figured out how to make things happen.
“I’m just excited to part of the agency as we get ready to go back to the moon. When I came to work for this agency many years ago, I thought we were going to do the shuttle and station thing for a couple of years and then the rest of my career would be go back to the moon and on to Mars and do other things that we’re going to do with human beings in space.
“Even though you suppress it after a while, it is a little disappointing that we spent 30 years in low-Earth orbit without sending human beings further out. That’s what inspired me as a teen-ager, the moon landings. That’s what I think will inspire teen-agers today. Not that what we’re doing isn’t important on the space station and the space shuttle -- I think it is extraordinarily important -- but the exploration vision is really motivational to me.”
The Discovery Channel’s high-definition NASA anniversary series When We Left Earth, premiers June 8. You can watch a preview here.
Interesting...although I am only three years older than our erstwhile space agency, I prefer to look at it in terms expressed by the final "wake-up" song of Apollo 17:
"We've Only Just Begun".
Can we see a useful dialogue between those of my era and Generation Y"
Can we see a rewarding of intiative, ala the Direct and Jupiter folks, instead of persecution for thinking outside the box and coloring outside the lines?
Posted by: Karen's husband | May 19, 2008 at 07:19 PM