[Greg]

Hmm... there's a lot more to NASA than rocket science.

I don't know what percentage of all the folks who work NASA are actually working on the spacecraft, and of those who work on it, how many need to know how to design a spacecraft. For every hands-on engineer there must be hundreds of folks working the milling machines, building and maintaining the buildings and physical plants and laboratories, doing quality control on everything, conducting the tests on the hardware, calibrating each piece of test equipment, researching, modeling, measuring, poking, prodding, painting, cleaning, lubricating, communicating, hiring, training, leading, archiving, retrieving, storing, cataloguing, wiring, plumbing, planning, buying, inspecting, guarding, and gardening. There's no doubt in my mind that you'd have lots and lots of transferrable skills that would be applicable to space stuff.

Then there are the software guys and the chipheads. Hoo boy! Whatever they do in their dark caverns, it must be neat!

My major problem in finding a job that I really wanted has been that I have lots of experience and skills in a very narrow field where these is exactly one customer in the whole world. Almost all of it would be transferrable to other industries but it's really difficult to convince people of that.