My first internship was at a company that was (apparently) a pretty big deal in the 80s, and by the time I'd gotten there was relegated to a quarter corner of a small floor in a building. The passion had long since left, the three remaining programmers were just ticking off days, and a sort of miasma of sadness and despair hung in the air. There was a brief hope when we showed up to work on a goofy R&D project, and within a few weeks you could tell the office was happier to have my co-intern and I around, if for no other reason than we were fresh, youthful faces.

I was very happy to move on from that gig, because I saw the future there and it was stagnation.

In Houston you get much the same feeling talking with NASA folks and former personnel...the writing is on the wall, the dream is all but dead, but the poor bastards haven't gotten the memo yet. There was once great hope for the future, once some great idea that using technology we could go out on rocket ships and study the universe and spread and thrive and grow and learn and love and all these wonderful things, and then suddenly we decided to reallocate those funds to frivolous and costly wars. Decided to spend that money instead on bureaucracy and police departments and shitty healthcare and a dozen other things.

By contrast, every technician and engineer I meet here in the energy industry is gleeful and well-paid, if perhaps overworked and overstressed. They get to make things, they get to order big impressive parts built to tolerances NASA would approve of and stick those things in the most inhospitable places you can imagine--if we ever wanted to go to Venus and set up shop, you'd want to hire Baker Hughes or NOV to build the gear.

This, despite the fact that the work they do is inevitably going to hurt the planet and mankind in the long run. It's a hell of a thing.