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You know, I hate this conception that all engineers are EE/CPE types. Sure. I'm in aerospace, which may not be a growth industry but certainly isn't one in much danger of stuff being outsourced. American companies still have the edge in experience, know-how, and institutional momentum. While Dan Goldin did his dead-level best to kill NASA, it's not quite dead yet, and between the public and private sectors there's a lot of need for know-how. Of course, the fun thing about aerospace is that, unlike the computer world, the new hires are treated like dirt for a reason--we really don't know crap. We learn a lot of basic conceptions in school, but there's so much OJT that it's not funny. I worked for my current employer for almost three years before graduation, and I'm still way behind on the power curve. It always amuses me, though, to watch people hit the big trends in technological fields. I'd tell a kid coming into school these days to major in civil engineering. We're going to need a lot of those folks soon, and they might as well get in while the getting's good.

In any case, to be fair these are Engineering students and their job isn't to decide the politics of the unit.

As an engineering student myself, I disagree. I think it's our job when developing products to consider the ethical results. I think we're past the point when we just build something and hand it off to marketing.

Of course, I work in a group where we have to do a lot of self-marketing, so maybe I see things a little differently than you do.

It would be one thing if NASA PAO would release anything of worth. But no, they have to block a mess of stuff that's interesting and even useful to know if you're halfway interested in space. Heck, I've been a little busy this last week, and I didn't even realize NASA was launching another ISS mission until last night--and I work with NASA.

NASA PAO is one of the most closeted groups. They let out only what they want you to know...

I had this discussion with some guys from work last night. They remarked that it indeed was one of those watershed American events, like the Kennedy assassination, the Apollo 11 landing, Reagan getting shot, etc.

What disparate views we had; our quality engineer [who's 59] was driving out to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for a review of some payload when the radio bulletins first came out. [Being a NASA town, they came out damned quick.] His comment was, "Oh, shit, it's finally happened."

Me [I'm 22], I was in first grade and distinctly remember the horror of my teacher, who had gotten decently far in the Teacher in Space program. That moment is one of the reasons I'm close to an aerospace engineering degree today [although I realize now I'm more of a writer than an engineer, but hey].

The other guy [who's 41] was at work, and there were no TV's and few radios. Word spread by mouth--"Did you hear? Did you hear? Challenger just blew up?" Scott said the most surreal moment was seeing Ernst Stuhlinger, one of Wehrner von Braun's rocket team, walking around the building, asking people, "Tell me how this could happen? HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?" Scott said that he never got an answer from anyone, and he never seemed to really see anyone as he asked them.

Yes, it's one of those days that will live in infamy.

...when I was hired in to my company, there was no manager for our small group. We're weird ducks anyway--a commercial products group based inside a NASA/DoD contractor, and no one wanted to do anything with us. Corporate tried to make my boss--a damned good project engineer--into the manager. I like the guy a lot, but he'll tell you that he's no manager-type. It does take a certain type of person to manage other people, and that's not always the #2 guy.

What happened? My boss held the job strictly on a temporary basis, we got a guy hired into the job, and things went back to A-OK. The "new guy" kept the heat off of the engineers and also brought some new insights in.

So, there's a lesson in this: Tell the PHB's to bring in someone new to the group. A manager doesn't have to know all about your group's work. A manager does have to communicate well with those horizontal and vertical to them. So explain how you're not qualified to take the job but very qualified to stay where you are. Good luck!

...if for no other reason than susceptibility to virii that exploit default settings of Outlook--unless you send out staff to install all computers with specific instructions to kill auto-preview, etc. We've been hit with every last one of the Outlook-exploiting virii to come out in the past year, and while it's mostly an annoyance, it does tend to tie up the servers for a few days.
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My best friend just left the same contractor I work for to go work for the U.S. Army. While he was slowly slogging through grad school in engineering management, he now has enough time to really pursue his Ph.D. in EM at our alma mater. They're paying for it, and they'll give him a paid year off to work on his Ph.D. stuff. Cool.
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Working as I do at Teledyne Brown Engineering, I see some of the NASA software-development process second-hand. I know they outsource a lot of it--such as the Payload Data Library, which TBE runs for Marshall Space Flight Center. [I wonder if that link is visible by the bulk of /.ers...] NASA is progressing more to industry standards for things--maybe if open-source becomes industry standard, the Feds might follow suit.

There are, believe it or not, some things that won't benefit from being open source. Besides, the Feds will probably decide that some things will create more trouble than they're worth...

Actually, only a hundred launches seems about right. We sometimes forget in our post-spacerace society exactly how complex, difficult, and downright dangerous these missions are.

Yeah, this is #100. FYI, the originally-predicted failure rate for STS launches was around 2%. STS-51L (Challenger) was one. I get nervous with every launch these days, some because of that value, the other because I work on a payload to go to ISS and know that STS explosion==me out of a job.

That's why every single mission-that's right, every one- has its own mission patch (by the way, you can see STS-92's patch at this location. They call them "missions" for a reason: they are as intricate and dangerous as any military action. The slightest mistake can cost billions of dollars and even irreplaceable human lives, as has already been demonstrated in our history.

Stupidly, there's a movement afoot at NASA Public Affairs Office (PAO--I refer to it as the "Perfect Asshole Office") to even kill mission patches. Consider NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's desire to eradicate the NASA "worm" logo. Specifically, this link, which states in part:

"Astronaut mission logos are an important part of NASA activities. They should continue to be used as they have been, since they are an established form of visual identification for a particular mission. However, in terms of media awareness and overall visibility to the public, the use of the 'meatball' should take precedence over the use of mission logos."

I mean, this is really just a Mickey Mouse agency. -sigh- Yet I work as a contractor.