Help wanted: slowdown in new programs erodes space industrial base.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Space Technology

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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- The U.S. space industry is losing critical skills and talent and is on a "downward trend," said Gen. C. Robert Kehler, the leader of Air Force Space Command.

Engineers and other technical experts--once plentiful in the heydays of NASA and the space race--are growing harder to find.

That's "not to say they don't produce amazing products with incredible capabilities--they do ... but there are issues that we have to be mindful of," Kehler said at the Space Symposium here.

Futurist and author Alvin Toffler said the United States is losing its edge when it comes to a field it once dominated. It's not exclusively an American world anymore, he said. "It's a Chinese world. It's an Indian world.

"We're going to have to get used to the fact that we're not going to be number one anymore. For a long time, we had no number two," Toffler said.

A wave of retirements in the space community has been predicted for many years. Alarms about the shortage of engineers, scientists and other technical experts from the baby boomer generation have sounded for a decade or more.

The only bright spot--if it can be called that--is that some of the these space technologists are putting off their retirement due to the sharp drop in the value of their pensions and 401K accounts during the past year.

"With the 401K issues, we see a lot of people postponing their retirements," said Wesley Covell, president of defense programs at Harris Corp.'s government communications systems division, Melbourne, Fla.

But that would be a temporary respite, he said. "I'm very concerned about science and technology and our ability to do this type of work in the long term," he said.

Aggravating the situation is the government's slow acquisition process, many vendors at the conference pointed out.

Kehler told reporters that the decline of the U.S. space industrial base is having some concrete effects on the nation's capabilities. The slowdown in work has caused some second--and thirdtier suppliers to leave the business. They are eventually replaced by less experienced companies.

"The fact of the matter is, until they get more experience, we sometimes see parts fail. That delays us, [and] causes us problems," he said.

And in space, failed parts can't be replaced as easily as a broken transmission on a truck. A failed part may mean a malfunctioning multi-million dollar satellite.

Space Command has had to be more vigilant with the quality of these secondary suppliers, he said.

Lt. Gen. John T. Sheridan, commander...