"We have to recognize that this is coming and this is a problem," says Susan Niebur, who presented her analysis on 21 June at an international conference on low-cost missions at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. As a cohort of former PIs nears retirement age, Niebur worries that burn out, budget overruns and missed launch windows will be the result if NASA doesn't find a way to get younger scientists the experience they need to step up into mission-leading roles.
Niebur first encountered the dilemma between 2003 and 2006, when she was the NASA official charged with running the fiercely competitive Discovery programme — the small, scientist-led planetary probes that are often the most innovative in NASA's repertoire. At that time, she says, she kept getting proposals "from the same guys".
Not that they were unqualified. On the contrary, they were precisely the sort of scientists NASA wanted in charge of spacecraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars — people who knew their science but had also dirtied their hands with instrument hardware and experienced the headaches of building a spacecraft. The problem was that there were so few of them — and they were getting older.
Now an independent consultant based in Silver Spring, Maryland, Niebur has been tracking the situation and says that it is getting worse. By 2015, when the winning proposal is chosen, there will be only 14 potential PIs aged 65 and under who have previously been PIs, deputy PIs or project scientists (see 'Planetary shortfall'). This means that many of the roughly 30 proposals that the Discovery programme attracts at every round will be coming from relative rookies.
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