Working at NASA was a childhood dream of mine. At some level it was probably the common desire of a child growing up in the 1980s to be an astronaut, but for me I'd say it went further than that - I wanted to be a part of humanity's future; I wanted to be an explorer, an enabler, a part of the team that brought humanity up from the trenches and into a new era of enlightenment, exploration, and existence. I saw NASA as the embodiment of this notion - they achieved the impossible as a matter of routine and their mission was to explore the universe, starting at the edge of our planet and working outwards.
That was 20 years ago.
This is now.
I did, through the convoluted maze of life, end up working at NASA. Not as an astronaut, of course; I'm no test pilot, no highly-decorated military hero, certainly not a member of the caste of uniformed elites which gets chosen for that line of work. I'm merely a contractor; a Project Engineer, that lowest form of life whose heroic deeds go unnoticed and unappreciated, but are vital for the success of nations - one pair of the feet on the ground that enable humanity to keep its head in the clouds. I am young and hopeful; creative and open-minded; practical and productive; scorned and dismissed.
I write this as a member of a perpetual, self-renewing underclass: the future. When politicians complain about saddling their children and grandchildren with debt, social problems, extremism, wars, pollution, and so on - that's my generation they're talking about, and the generations that will follow.
That is a profound problem: my future is being shaped by people who will not be around to take part in it. My future will be a product of a past generation's needs, wants, and aspirations; their greed, corruption, and broken structure. Today's politicians are better representatives of our world's checkered past than its potential future.
So when surveying the warped and broken future I've been given, it's tempting to blame today's politicians, but that's neither productive nor correct. The blame rests squarely at the feet of my generation, those who are 25-35 years old: we are old enough to have a significant impact on the direction of our future, and young enough to care what happens in 50 years. But we are also too vain, apathetic, self-absorbed, shortsighted, and unaware to affect positive changes. We have care little for dogma unless it gets us something for free. We don't educate ourselves; we don't vote; we don't write our elected officials; we don't participate in the process. Instead we wait for work to be done, then complain that we don't like the results. As it stands, our only hope for our own future is that the current generation of decision makers blunders onto a path that is not irreversibly destructive.
I work at NASA because I hope my children live in a time where the night sky is not an empty, foreboding vacuum, but a place of wonder and excitement and discovery; where universe is an unexplored country teeming with opportunity, not a pretty bit of custom-made scenery. I want a future for them that is beyond my imagination, and today I freely give my heart and mind and body and soul in the hope, against all reason, of creating that future for them, out of the present. There is still a small, undernourished part of me that views NASA as an integral part of that bright future; an organization of extraordinary people who can invent the impossible.
There is a lot of talk these days about the future of NASA; where do we go, how do we get there, what is the shape of our vehicle, and ... just who is this "we," anyway? The fact that there is so much discussion is great. The problem is that the wrong people are talking, and the structure of our future spacecraft and exploration missions are being decided by politicians, whose only stakes in the issue relate to their political careers. They lack the competence (and interest) to specify the revolutionary hardware that will take humanity beyond the next threshold. That lack is not the problem - our government is designed to account for this by encouraging competent people to counsel their elected officials. The problem is that our politicians don't let their lack of competence or motivation stop them from making the sorts of decisions that should be made by engineers and scientists, because there is no positive force to guide them.
So we - the future - are about to be left with an architecture for space exploration that is provisional and limited; grafted together out of parts specified because of campaign contributions and aspirations for re-election, rather than efficiency or reliability or appropriateness. We are sent on missions chosen out of misdirected national pride and fond memories of the past, rather than rational calculation and the needs of the future.
As this happens, my generation sits and watches - wallowing in self-pity, taking "no" for an answer. If we take the initiative for our own future instead of waiting passively for it to happen, we have the tools and the knowledge to achieve great things. Our children should be born in a world that is the cradle of humanity - not the container of it. They should never remember a time when they were the tenants of a single, crowded, strained planet.
This is my call to my generation. We will live in a future of our own making. It is our responsibility, to ourselves and our posterity, to design that future to be better than the present. Now is the time to make hard choices - to invest in our own future. Now is the time to move out of the proverbial basement; to stop living off the glory and accomplishments of our parents and grandparents and start solving our own problems. We are the richest and best-educated generation in the history of this world - and there are plenty of us at NASA. We need to make our voices heard within the organization - to speak up and take the risks that our managers don't want to take, and not fear failure. We need to rid ourselves of the tyranny of evaluation, and know that we are not beholden to the past. Never accept that "it can't be done" - that notion is the sanctuary of fools, who seek the ease of well-worn paths instead of the challenge of creating new ones. This is NASA - the response to "it can't be done" should be a chuckle and a solution, not a demoralized hunt for a well-used alternative.
Stop twittering, start speaking. Stop waiting for direction, make your own direction. It's up to us to decide what possibilities our futures hold, then to act and make those possibilities happen. For all of our sake: start thinking, start acting!