Once Upon A Time NASA Was Much Younger
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Keith’s note: Former Senator, Geologist, and Apollo 17 Astronaut Jack Schmitt spoke at an event in Washington, DC today on lunar exploration. I can recall sitting in a Senate hearing in 1978 hearing Sen. Schmitt worrying about this topic, saying “we are eating our seed corn”. His concern is even more poignant now.
Well, SpaceX knows the average age of their employees. But, as far as I know, they haven’t published the number. Since they are a private company I doubt anyone else has access to the data. That’s personal information about employees not something in a publicly available database or something you can get by filing a FOIA request. But I have talked to people with friends who work for SpaceX, and it seems like they hire people young, work them hard and have a high rate of people burning out and leaving. If that’s correct, then it’s a safe bet the mean age is much closer to 26 than 46.
PayScale did a survey and came up with an average age of 29 for SpaceX. Its combined job satisfaction & meaningfulness was 88%. Tesla was 30/70%, and Facebook 29/40%. Apple 31/66%.
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/…
Such a dynamic statistic (of course, average age changes from month to month), but it is obviously regarding the implications: SpaceX has a young workforce, NASA has an elderly one. The biggest take-away I would have is that SpqaceX staff can do these hard things, don’t think they are too young, these younglings have done these things before!
And they are not burden with outdated bureaucratic procedures, meetings and the need to seek supervisor approval for every minor decision which is common with an aging organization.
Jim Collins in his great book “Built to Last” found that the average life span of a corporation was about 40 years. NASA, like most government agencies has exceed that age and has had the associated build up of inefficiencies.
There are no outdated bureaucratic procedures because human cognitive organization, capacity and capability has never changed (and most likely will not). The only changing variable is the amount of money/scale involved. Now, the question is how much of these bureaucratic procedures are reinvented over and over without learning anything from what has happened before. Nothing is new, just a different point on the wheel. Also, accountability and ego plays a huge role in the efficiency of this process.
True, the military had a lot of outdated procedures before WWII forced them to clean house the hard way. I imagine there are areas that need to be clean up today. But many specific procedures are outdated because they are based on outdated processes or technology. That is the point, as an organization ages it accumulates “bureaucratic baggage” that makes it inefficient.
The cure to that is sufficient money and immediate accountability for actions and behaviors.
So does Congress.
Yes, and one of the problems is that Congressional staffers still believe NASA is the best and last word on space and space technology. Part of the paradigm shift taking place will be for staffers to recognize that the cutting edge is in industry (SpaceX, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace) now, not NASA.
The working lifetime of the entrepreneurial founder after they take it public?
40 years.
I wonder if this resulting calcification in inherent to capitalism? Is there a capitalistic business structure that can avoid the short lifespan?
A big question for a space blog, sure. Those of us who view history through the lens of labor’s struggle against capital – yes, we are still out here – wonder if perhaps viewing labor as simply another cost item somehow contributes to this hardening process.
There’s nothing wrong with being 46 – it’s not as though being young magically imparts an ability to innovate.
I suppose the age distribution in a company is likely to be skewed towards the younger end, but that should put the mean somewhere in the thirties.
Unfortunately age discrimination is alive and well in this country.
It’s very unlikely that a 26 year old would insist on a particular approach or process because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
It’s not necessarily true that a 46 year old would insist on a particular approach or process because “that’s how we’ve always done it” either. The idea that older workers are less creative and less flexible is false and is an example of ageism. The better approach is to focus on the person rather than how much time they’ve spent breathing air.
With that said, there has to be way to maintain a robust, creative workforce that does’t focus on age, that removes those that can’t contribute in a way that’s needed. If all someone has to offer is “that’s the way we’ve always done it”, then perhaps that person should be replaced with someone who’s ideas aren’t so hobbled.
An aside: it is ironic that it wasn’t long ago at all that SpaceX was being criticized for its young workforce and their “lack of experience”.
Fair enough, this isn’t inherently tied to age. I was thinking in terms of fresh eyes on a problem and people who _can’t_ say “that’s the way we’ve always done it” because they are new to those practices. Someone just starting out in the field would be like that. But, as you point out, that could also be true of a 46 year old engineer moving from work on (for example) aircraft to satellites.
How can this be s surprise?
1960: US population ~180 million and median age was 29.5
2018: US population ~327 million and median age nearly 40.
And yes, NASA of all places should look to foster, encourage and care for the huge knowledge and experience base it has created, again and again. People should be encouraged to work, in a happy, rewarding and stimulating place AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. Its not only good for the organization and its efforts but good (medically/psychologically proven) for the health of the individual.
How do you think this will look in another 25 years?
If people continue working for an organization for as long as possible, how do younger people find a place in the organization, bring in new ideas and gain experience? This has, in fact, become a problem for planetary missions. Given the long duration of the missions, there have been missions where someone started off as a post-doc and eventually became the PI for an instrument. But in other cases, that hasn’t happened because the more senior people wanted to keep working and there was no path upward for the younger people.
And if you have a lot of senior workers who don’t keep current you end up with the basis of this quote from Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
https://www.clarkefoundatio…
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
NASA engineers decided years ago, based on their experience, that reusable rockets were not worth the trouble of development. SpaceX proved them wrong.
I think you are confusing bureaucratic/institutional decision making combined with finances and maybe ego with age and assuming there is no actual desire to do something different if given half a chance.
That is only a symptom of the ROOT cause for lack of youth in planetary or anywhere else for that matter. 1) how do you motivate youth to enter any given profession – you need to get them interested in the topic and in the case of science, bolster any inclinations towards curiosity and learning very early. 2) you have to sell them in learning difficult, time consuming topics as they mature. 3) you have to somewhere along the line, high school’ish, prove that money and a good life is to be made in the future. And this is just the tip of the psychological problems involved. NONE of these are addressed by any company or the planetary community to sufficient scale. Just dumping old people out to make physical space does not work and is a waste of talent and experience, and puts them in an early grave. And I thought we got into these fields to make them life long careers of interest and not to retire on welfare and sick.
So are you saying that people over 30 have nothing to contribute?
I don’t trust ’em. 😉
You gave yourself away. Only someone well over 30 would remember that phrase 🙂
It is not the age of the employees that matters, it is the age of the organization.
When NASA was launching a Saturn V every two months, there were few entrenched managers and lots of worker bees. In the ensuing years, every time that NASA suffered a reduction in force, the managers kept their jobs and the worker bees were let go, resulting in an increasing ratio of managers to workers. That is what made NASA the hidebound bureaucracy that it is today.
Congress was also shoveling about 4% of the national budget into NASA in the Saturn V days. It is easy to do daring things when money is no object.
Calendar age has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence or creativity, but lack of flexibility in being allowed to move between jobs and enter new engineering specializations throughout one’s career can limit the possibilities. Denial of training and employment opportunities to older workers can be devastating to their productivity and creativity.
Having graduated with the peak of the baby boom population, nobody “got out of my way” so that I could have a career, and I feel no obligation to get out of anybody else’s way. And experience does matter, I cannot count the number of arrogant young geniuses I have encountered who thought that they knew everything. A few decades in the space business can teach one to be properly humble.
Just looking around my center, that number is spot-on, I’m only a few years older myself. I’d be hard pressed to find anyone without grey hair. Do people our age still contribute? Sure, no one denies that. But the fact is that we are within a decade or so of retiring, and there is a notable lack of young people to replace us. Effectively NASA is set up for a population crash. Very few of the talented young people I know view NASA as an attractive career path. Many that we have had left to go into big data with the tech giants. Space just isn’t glamorous anymore. Those that are interested in space go to places like SpaceX. Which seems to burn them out pretty fast.
There seems to be no shortage of applicants for NASA’s internship programs, the odds of being chosen are still very low. There are still lots of youngsters who think that NASA is the coolest job in the world…
Before they have worked for or with NASA.
Exactly. Everyone thinks I have the coolest job ever upon hearing what it is, which is great at cocktail parties. If they actually knew that almost every day is spent in meetings arguing over how many angels can dance on pinheads, or planning things we will never actually do, they would have a different idea. I’ve never seen an organization so good at planning things.