I've been doing aerospace engineering since 1976. I wanted to be an aerospace engineer since I was a five years old (1958). I spent 7 years in postgraduate school to get into this game. I did this because I wanted to design manned Mars vehicles (wasn't I stupid!). I've been all dressed up with no where to go since 1984. I have watched ***many*** bright young guys get their Ph.D.s in aerospace, enter the field, realize that's it dying, pitch their degrees into the trash and start over from scratch. Unfortunately more than one of these guys opted to get involved with the Dot Com and got burned twice.

Here's the part that really hurts: I know that if we don't get into space then we can kiss our civilization goodbye. If our country does not revitalize the aerospace sector soon, we can probably kiss our economy goodbye along with much of our national security. Those precision bombs, fighter planes, etc. that made mince meat out of the Iraqis was courtesy of American aerospace technology. Most of the guys who designed that hardware got into the game because they wanted to build spaceships. Most of those guys are in their forties and are not being replaced. Lots of guys are retiring from NASA and taking their knowledge with them. Some of this knowledge cost billions of dollars to create and will cost billions of dollars to recreate if-and-when we ever chose to do so.

Right now, incredible self-inflicted vandalism is occuring to the aerospace industry and No One Cares!

Gary