Goodbye Moon

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Career Development  

In the great green room
There was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of--
The cow jumping over the moon

-  excerpt from “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that technology-based companies are still struggling to deal with the problems plaguing the current economy. Certainly, some firms are continuing to make progress and others are leading the way, but for many the markets have become less free and the completion more lean and fierce as the money dries up or is more closely held by customers. Just what do you do if you are a rocket scientist, however? Unfortunately, they too are not immune to the effects of an economic downturn.

Within the next few months, approximately 2,000 members of the workforce responsible for the operation of the space shuttle program will have their jobs cut from the United Space Alliance (USA), a joint venture created by the Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation. Understandably, some of the reductions are due to the sun setting on the aging orbiter fleet, but a newer project that was designed to put astronauts back on the moon is also in danger of being shelved.

Ideally, the funding that was being used for the soon-to-be-retired U.S. space shuttle program was to be diverted and made available for the moon/constellation project. A hard …

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