Generation Y (Millennials) at NASA
NASA's Gen Y Speaks Out, Wired
"At the recent NASA Next Generation Exploration Conference at NASA Ames, two young NASA employees, Nick Skytland and Garret Fitzpatrick, gave a powerful presentation called "The Gen Y Perspective"-- a set of charts they had delivered to their center management the week before that made it all the way up to the Administrator's desk. Now they were presenting it at a conference of their peers, with special guest moon walker Buzz Aldrin listening."
http://images.spaceref.com/news/2008/NASA.gen.y.pdf
The PDF is of a slideshow.
Years ago, I posted to a website called Fourthturning.com. The website was based on the book The Fourth Turning, by Neil Howe and William Strauss. The site has a discussion forum, and I was active on it from 1999 through around 2003. The conversation there is one of the best on the internet for historical and current event analysis. The members are really into the thick of the theory, so first-time visitors can be overwhelmed with all the jargon.
Without going into a lot of detail, here's the gist of Gen Y / Millennials, according to the work of Howe and Strauss:
- History influences generations (millions of people)
- Generations influence history (via large social trends)
- One can find similarities in various generations throughout US history
- These similarities repeat over time, usually in the same order.
- Generation Y / Millennials is more like the generation who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II, than the previous generation who came of age largely during the 1910s (World War I) and 1920s (Prohibition).
- This is very macro, attempting to describe tens of millions of people, and their associative behavioral trends. Individual and group exceptions apply, etc.
What the presenters get at is that selling space development and NASA the way it was [not] sold to the Boomers and Gen X is not going to work, and that this bodes ill for NASA and space development in the future. There is heavy focus on NASA specifically, and one can make arguments for the enthused private business attempts at making space development a reality. These businesses are ran largely by Boomers and Xers (due to experiential and financial constraints), so enthusiasm is not restricted to the Millennials.
That may the concern that the presenters are getting at. The Boomers have the Moon Landing as a pivotal, shared historical experience. Gen X saw the space shuttle, and the infamous 1986 explosion on live TV. For the Millennials...space shuttles have always blown up, the space station was either Russian, or a continuously delayed international one.
From personal experience, I was born in 1982. I don't remember the shuttle explosion. The first major disaster was the Exxon Valdez spill. I remember the space station being a big deal right up until 1993, and then Mir fell into the ocean, after suffering through many problems. NASA seems to get less done, at a slower speed, than the City of San Antonio. Were it not for SICSA, I may have not have gotten into Space Architecture in the first place, going instead into hi-tech building design or urban planning.
As Dwayne A. Day writes,
"Unfortunately, the human projects are in worse shape. The shuttle is still grounded, the International Space Station is still years away from completion, and the bold new space exploration “Vision” is mired in the drudgery of budget politics. But wondrous things are happening way out there in the deep cold black of outer space and we do not have anybody to turn the science into poetry."
From personal experience, I was born in 1982. I don't remember the shuttle explosion. The first major disaster was the Exxon Valdez spill. I remember the space station being a big deal right up until 1993, and then Mir fell into the ocean, after suffering through many problems. NASA seems to get less done, at a slower speed, than the City of San Antonio. Were it not for SICSA, I may have not have gotten into Space Architecture in the first place, going instead into hi-tech building design or urban planning.
The Gen Y presenters call for making NASA (and/or its image) more interactive. Engage people with all the tools of social networking. My criticism is that internet-based technologies move fast, and trends faster. By the time someone at NASA has made a move, the crowds have moved on. Maybe letting private astronauts and scientists take their own initiative, if they so desire. But, a TV presence is still necessary, until astronauts can liveblog the launch experience from within the shuttle, and upload the video to YouTube.
Now, wouldn't that be cool?
"At the recent NASA Next Generation Exploration Conference at NASA Ames, two young NASA employees, Nick Skytland and Garret Fitzpatrick, gave a powerful presentation called "The Gen Y Perspective"-- a set of charts they had delivered to their center management the week before that made it all the way up to the Administrator's desk. Now they were presenting it at a conference of their peers, with special guest moon walker Buzz Aldrin listening."
http://images.spaceref.com
The PDF is of a slideshow.
Years ago, I posted to a website called Fourthturning.com. The website was based on the book The Fourth Turning, by Neil Howe and William Strauss. The site has a discussion forum, and I was active on it from 1999 through around 2003. The conversation there is one of the best on the internet for historical and current event analysis. The members are really into the thick of the theory, so first-time visitors can be overwhelmed with all the jargon.
Without going into a lot of detail, here's the gist of Gen Y / Millennials, according to the work of Howe and Strauss:
- History influences generations (millions of people)
- Generations influence history (via large social trends)
- One can find similarities in various generations throughout US history
- These similarities repeat over time, usually in the same order.
- Generation Y / Millennials is more like the generation who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II, than the previous generation who came of age largely during the 1910s (World War I) and 1920s (Prohibition).
- This is very macro, attempting to describe tens of millions of people, and their associative behavioral trends. Individual and group exceptions apply, etc.
What the presenters get at is that selling space development and NASA the way it was [not] sold to the Boomers and Gen X is not going to work, and that this bodes ill for NASA and space development in the future. There is heavy focus on NASA specifically, and one can make arguments for the enthused private business attempts at making space development a reality. These businesses are ran largely by Boomers and Xers (due to experiential and financial constraints), so enthusiasm is not restricted to the Millennials.
That may the concern that the presenters are getting at. The Boomers have the Moon Landing as a pivotal, shared historical experience. Gen X saw the space shuttle, and the infamous 1986 explosion on live TV. For the Millennials...space shuttles have always blown up, the space station was either Russian, or a continuously delayed international one.
From personal experience, I was born in 1982. I don't remember the shuttle explosion. The first major disaster was the Exxon Valdez spill. I remember the space station being a big deal right up until 1993, and then Mir fell into the ocean, after suffering through many problems. NASA seems to get less done, at a slower speed, than the City of San Antonio. Were it not for SICSA, I may have not have gotten into Space Architecture in the first place, going instead into hi-tech building design or urban planning.
As Dwayne A. Day writes,
"Unfortunately, the human projects are in worse shape. The shuttle is still grounded, the International Space Station is still years away from completion, and the bold new space exploration “Vision” is mired in the drudgery of budget politics. But wondrous things are happening way out there in the deep cold black of outer space and we do not have anybody to turn the science into poetry."
From personal experience, I was born in 1982. I don't remember the shuttle explosion. The first major disaster was the Exxon Valdez spill. I remember the space station being a big deal right up until 1993, and then Mir fell into the ocean, after suffering through many problems. NASA seems to get less done, at a slower speed, than the City of San Antonio. Were it not for SICSA, I may have not have gotten into Space Architecture in the first place, going instead into hi-tech building design or urban planning.
The Gen Y presenters call for making NASA (and/or its image) more interactive. Engage people with all the tools of social networking. My criticism is that internet-based technologies move fast, and trends faster. By the time someone at NASA has made a move, the crowds have moved on. Maybe letting private astronauts and scientists take their own initiative, if they so desire. But, a TV presence is still necessary, until astronauts can liveblog the launch experience from within the shuttle, and upload the video to YouTube.
Now, wouldn't that be cool?
posted by Christopher Loyd @ 7:26 PM
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