Looks like NASA educational opportunities such as Fun With Urine which we covered a few weeks back on SciScoop may not quite be enough to lure the best and the brightest students into becoming a NASA rocket scientist. A General Accounting Office report last year found that NASA has three times as many engineers aged 60 and over as it has 30 and under — and a quarter of its nearly 19,000 employees will be eligible for retirement in five years. “It’s one of the most serious problems at NASA right now,” says Wei Shyy, chairman of the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at the University of Florida. “They need to beef up their efforts to recruit young people and increase their pay. Then they need to find a way to retain the experience of those who are leaving.”

In response, NASA officials say they are redoubling their efforts to get young people energized about space exploration. In addition to coaxing astronauts to visit classrooms, the agency is funding elementary school science projects, sending student experiments into space, and creating more apprenticeships for talented high schoolers and internships for college students. Maybe they could take a page from the latest European Space Agency (ESA) educational effort: the Aurora Student Design Competition. ESA is looking for innovative, imaginative ideas, concepts and technologies to enhance Europe’s long-term Aurora programme for the robotic and human exploration of the Moon, Mars and asteroids. Teams of graduate and undergraduate students from universities in Europe and Canada are invited to participate in this exciting program, working with their professors and supervisors to produce a project relevant to the Aurora program in one of five Aurora project areas: Flagship, Arrow, Manned, Robotic or New Technology. Check out the competition rules for definitions of these classes and other details. Important dates for the competition (all in 2003) are: 9 March, submit outline of the design project; 14 March, notification of the selected teams; 30 July, deadline to submit the final project; and 8 & 9 September, Aurora Academia Workshop project presentations and prize awards. Prizes include a professional visit to the European space centres, including the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana; attendance at the IAF Congress in Vancouver, Canada, at ESA’s expense; and sponsorship to present the winning project at suitable conferences and symposia. If you win or even enter, let SFT know!