• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

NASA's Future Rests in New Generation of Aerospace Engineers

Posted on: Sunday, 21 December 2003, 06:00 CST

Dec. 21--PASADENA, Calif.--Growing up in Detroit, Julie Townsend was the kind of student who took the house-wiring class and the robotics class and eventually, advanced placement physics.

"I was never cool when I was a kid. ... I was always one of the nerdy ones," she said.

At 13, on a whim, she enrolled in a two-week summer course in aerospace engineering at Purdue University.

"It was the sort of thing where they taught us a little bit about orbital mechanics and then we got to design our own little rockets and our professors helped build them. We launched them with eggs in the payload and we tracked them and figured out how high they had flown," Townsend said.

She returned home determined to become an aerospace engineer.

"Of course, everybody thought it was very funny," she said. "They'd say, 'Julie, tell 'em what you're going to be," and they'd laugh."

By 1997, Townsend had completed her junior year in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was doing an internship at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. That was the summer the space agency's Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars, the first successful landing on the Red Planet in more than two decades.

"I just thought, how cool must it be to work on a project that lands on the surface of Mars," she said.

Now, at 27, with an undergraduate degree from MIT, a master's degree from Stanford, and a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, home to NASA's Mars program, she's about to find out.

She and her 20-something colleagues are among NASA's prized ranks of "fresh-outs" (as in fresh out of college) -- young engineers and scientists in great demand at an agency whose workers are retiring faster than the next generation can be recruited and trained.

Overall, NASA now has three times as many workers older than 60 than those younger than 30. In the next five years, 25 percent of the agency's work force of 19,000 will be eligible for retirement, making the "youngsters" the agency's hope for the very near future.

Next month, Townsend and others participating in their first Mars mission will watch as two robotic geologists they helped design and test attempt to land and rove the planet's cold, rocky surface.

"I've been here for three years, and I still drive into the lab every day and I'm like, 'I work here. I work on the Mars mission," " Townsend said. "I see some of these people who worked on Pathfinder in meetings and stuff and I'm like, 'That's Rob Manning. I work with Rob Manning. I work with Jennifer Trosper.' "

Actually landing a spacecraft on Mars is extremely difficult. After Pathfinder's spectacular success, two more probes were sent, and lost.

If the current rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, fail to complete their mission, Townsend said, "Of course I would be heart-broken."

"But it's a hard place to get to, and if one of these vehicles or both of these vehicles don't make it, we'll start work on the next one and try again, try not to make the same mistakes again," she said. "It doesn't end here for me."

Far from it. Once this mission ends, Townsend will have more time for hobbies such as karate, volleyball, piano and hiking. She wants to start tinkering with robotics in her apartment, and she wants to go back to school for robotics research. She'd like to work on JPL's next Mars landing, scheduled for 2009, and she hopes to apply to the astronaut corps.

"I think it would be such an exciting thing to be able to travel in space and to see that and just to have the opportunity to see life from a perspective that so few people have," she said.

Does she want to walk on Mars?

"You know, I don't know if that would be such a hot deal, spending six months in a tin can there and back," she said. "I don't know that I would want to be that separated from my life.

"The fact that I couldn't order a pizza wouldn't be the type of thing that would deter me, but I would like to have a family, and I think I wouldn't want to just leave for years at a time," she said. "But if our ability to send people on interplanetary missions changes dramatically in my lifetime, I may reconsider."

-----

To see more of the Houston Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.HoustonChronicle.com

(c) 2003, Houston Chronicle. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

More News in this Category