Some 120 people from over 40 space-related organizations convened in Washington, D.C. on Thursday March 27, 2003 to scrutinize issues facing space educators and students in the coming decades. The all day session, sponsored by the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation and NASA, and over a dozen financial backers, included keynote addresses by well-known space personalities followed by discussion groups. The workshop found many areas of agreement as to both the problems faced and possible solutions. The fact that employment in aerospace had declined from over 1.2 million down to some 700,000 was found to be of serious concern as was the fact that graduates in technical disciplines had declined in the last 15 years from 450,000 to 350,000.

Workshop participants posed a number of innovative suggestions as to ways of recruiting students to meet the needs of a “graying workforce”. One of the many ideas of the day was that future government contracts should require that bidders provide a 2% set aside in major contracts for training and education to be carried out in cooperation with schools, universities, museums and other non-profit groups on the basis of “in-kind” programs such as internships, scholarships and coop programs. The workshop also endorsed many of the ideas that were highly rated in the national questionnaire survey conducted before the workshop. These results are contained in the “White Paper on Space Education” that is posted at www.sspi.org , www.spacejournal.org and www.wsbr.org . Also key findings from the workshop are to be published in the journal of Space Policy in the Fall of 2004 in an article prepared by the key organizers of the workshop, Joseph N. Pelton of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, Randy Johnson of Auburn University and Don Flournoy of Ohio University.