The past couple of years have been rough for a lot of people who work for NASA, especially, it seems, for those of us in the contractor workforce, which consitutes the majority of the folks involved in the human spaceflight program. My company, United Space Alliance, has been downsizing regularly as we tumble toward the end of the Space Shuttle program with no replacement in site. And USA is not alone. We’ve already lost thousands of good, smart people to layoffs, with more to come. The Constellation program, which had been NASA’s forward plan for human spaceflight, was infamously (and I believe thoughtlessly) killed off by President Obama in 2009. The President did this before having formulated a reasonable alternative plan for NASA, and to date there is still no viable program in place to keep the NASA workforce intact moving forward. So even though NASA’s budget is intact, the agency is not willing (or perhaps allowed) to spend that budget employing the very workforce that made it great.
So morale has been hit hard, and many of our valued colleagues have left — some voluntarily, due to the stresses of such an uncertain future here, and others, sadly, quite involuntarily. To those folks, and to those who remain, I dedicate my latest song, which is probably more of a commentary than my usual parody-type fare: http://music.chuvala.com/songs/nasa_town .