The Administrator of NASA, Charles Bolden blogged recently about his recent trip to Atlanta to visit Georgia Tech’s “Day of Engineering.” Bolden attended a Facebook pep rally that was the kick off to President Obama’s new “Stay with it” campaign, which is devoted to graduating 10,000 engineers each year.
“Spearheaded by Intel President & CEO, Paul Otellini, who is also a member of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the Stay With It campaign will provide mentors and other supports to increase the number of American engineering graduates which has fallen woefully behind other surging economies and has led to a shortage of skilled workers for American jobs,” Bolden said.
Bolden thinks that NASA and Intel’s participation is important because he sees aerospace and computer technology as the growth industries of the future.
In a rather interesting aside, Bolden says that NASA will need more skilled engineers to help with its plans to once again start up manned missions. “NASA is now embarking on ambitious agenda of deep space exploration that will carry our astronauts to places where we have never been, including an asteroid and eventually Mars.” This reiterates NASA’s goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, as reported by space.com this time last year. This goal was originally outlined by President Obama in an April 2010 speech at Kennedy Space Center. In that same speech, the president said he believed humans could be sent into orbit around Mars by the mid-2030’s.
Fourteen other universities participated in the event through Facebook viewing parties. You can still watch the presentation, including a message from the president and a panel discussion with Bolden, Otellini, and Gary May, Dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, below.