Coyote TV - High Desert Advocate

             For the first time in history American trained scientists, engineers, and technicians are looking abroad for job security as this country pulls back from space exploration.
    “I never ever thought that we would even think about working/living in a foreign country.” said the wife of one rocket scientist at Utah’s ATK facility. “But now it is looking like a possibility especially with the president cutting out US manned flight program.”
    Last week ATK laid off 420 of its Utah workers because two of its programs were ending.
    ATK builds solid fuel rocket motors for the space shuttle as well as a wide variety of military missiles. Located 30 miles west of Brigham City, it is one of Utah’s largest civilian employers.
    The company had 3,900 employees in Utah before the current round of layoffs, announced in December. In addition to 420 on Thursday, it plans to lay off another 300 employees and also laid off 550 last October.
    ATK spokesman George Torres said the 420 laid off last Thursday was a lower number than originally planned. In December the company said it would cut 500. In addition, 55 of the 420 are leaving voluntarily.
    ATK is giving all those laid off a week’s pay for every year they worked for ATK, up to 26 weeks, and is holding job fairs. Federal stimulus funds will give each employee $800 a month toward COBRA health insurance costs for 15 months.
    Torres declined to speculate how many more employees might be lost if Ares is cut. The motors being built for it have commercial applications, he said, so it is impossible to say what the impact will be.
    Torres said Congressional representatives in Texas, Alabama, Florida and Utah are already organizing to fight.
    But for many in the space industry, putting up a political fight to save their jobs is distasteful and a waste of resources at best.
    “These are scientists who spent their life times working on the dream of manned space flight,” she said. “Even if they win this time around with the current political climate there is very little guarantee that they won’t have to go through the whole thing again next year. It is obvious that the President doesn’t value the space program. Is it really worth laying off all of the scientists, engineers, and technicians that have valuable experience in this area to replace these jobs with some temp jobs to work on infrastructure. It took years to achieve our current levels of technology in this field that is closely intertwined with defense technology and typically falls under the ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’ philosophy.”
    Even before the announced retreated from sending United States men and women into the final frontier there was a small but distinct trend of foreign born but American trained scientists returning back to their homelands.
    The highly skilled, Indian-born talent that once flocked to the US is now returning home, “turning America’s brain drain into India’s brain gain,” a report released by a high-tech lobbying group in Silicon Valley said.
    Titled ‘Losing the Competitive Advantage? The Challenge for Science and Technology in the United States,’ the report also says that countries like India and China, through the restructuring of their economies, were dramatically increasing the skill sets of their work force, thereby posing a challenge to the US leadership in the technology domain.
    “Public-private partnerships (in India) have invested in technical universities and communications infrastructure to create cutting-edge technology parks in places like Bangalore. This will only make India more competitive and alluring to investors and multinational companies,” the report by AeA, formerly known as the American Electronic Association, says.
    India is embarking on further reforms to provide labor flexibility, free flows of capital, and desperately needed infrastructure improvement, it says adding that the country, along with China, was catching up in critical areas and has restructured their economy to benefit from the free market system they once resisted.
    But those returning natives could just be just the vanguard of what could be  a brain drain of historic proportions and have far reaching implications.
    America was a beacon to the best and the brightest foreigners precisely because it also had a a large and talented native genius pool and the public/private support to boldly go where no man has gone before.
    The very fact that some of these home grown geniuses are looking abroad
does not bode well not just for the aerospace industry but for America’s preeminent place in the world.
    Throughout history the country that leads in science and exploration also leads the world in every other category from quality of life to military domination.
    History also proves that nations which lose their scientists and researchers invariably diminish.