excerpt http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=14828 from retirement speech:

QUESTION: Getting back to the issue of NASA reform, I was just wondering if you had anything to say about your efforts to upgrade the skills of the NASA work force.

O'KEEFE: Well, first and foremost, I think as a baseline assumption, the skills of the NASA work force is pretty exemplary. I mean, among the talent that I've had the privilege to work with in my professional career, this is, person for person, some of the most extraordinarily talented, diverse, disciplined kind of folks that I've ever dealt with. It's just really extraordinary.

In looking at our assessment of what are the strategic management of human capital objectives -- the people kind of focus that we need to have in terms of disciplines and skills, as engineers, scientists and technologists in the future -- there has converged over the last three years a very clear understanding of what kind of skill mix do we need to carry out the objectives that have been handed to us and directed to us.

And I think a comprehensive effort has gone into that. We now have across the agency about 130 different specific definitions of the kind of skill talents that are required to carry this out, and they mean the same thing at every center in every element of this agency.

O'KEEFE: That wasn't true three years ago. There were hundreds of different definitions, and one definition of an electrical engineer in one location meant something totally different in a different area, or a different part of the centers, or wherever else. Now it's a standard kind of understanding of what is required.

And what we find is that there are some skill mixes for which we really need to focus on recruiting new talent to the task because of either actuarial realities -- people are going to retire -- or because we have fewer of them than what we need.

For a very specific example, folks who are nuclear engineers -- if you're going to pursue power generation and propulsion capabilities under Project Prometheus in the manner that we are, what you find and when you inventory across all the skills that we have across the agency is among the folks we have who are skilled in this particular expertise, there are fewer of them than we need, and most of the ones we have are within three years of retirement.

That tells you, you ought to go recruit.

So that's why we're really out there focusing very directly on folks who have the kind of talents in those skill mix areas that will contribute to, for example, that kind of a case, as well as others. There are other specific examples that fit in the same category.

Well...Well... Project Prometheus I and II something tells me NASA is deperately looking for U.S. people to train in nuclear space technology...this smells like opportunities for U.S. university students !!