This isn't your grandfather's NASA.

That's the gist of a growing push at the space agency as a whole, and at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton in particular, to get more peach fuzz among the grizzled veterans of its workforce.

In fact, NASA Langley just took a good hard look at its civil service employees and found that more than 85 percent of them are older than 40, with an average age of 50.

The center has about 3,500 employees in all, but just more than half are civil servants directly hired and the rest employed by private companies but contracted to NASA.

As older civil servants retire during the next several years and tight budgets continue to hamper hiring, the center says it wants to use this as an opportunity to transform itself by better defining where it wants to go and what skill sets it needs to get there.

"What the center has done is to develop an emerging skills list that we can use to guide hiring," said John Costulis, head of the center's new Workforce Management and Policy Office. "Since we have limited ability to hire people, new hire requests are reviewed by top management to make sure the employees' skills meet future requirements and Langley priorities."

NASA Langley has a hand in a wide range of research projects, from aeronautics to space exploration to Earth science. It's expanding its work in advanced composite materials for aircraft and spacecraft structures, for instance, and in deep-space exploration technologies.

The center has already begun targeting younger talent, and in the past year increased the number of civil servant employees younger than 40 by 5 percent. The current total stands at 18 percent, but NASA Langley said its goal is to bump that to 30 percent.

It has several avenues to accomplish that, including Pathways programs that offer college students and recent graduates a taste of NASA careers. One current opening on NASA's website, for instance, is for a research engineering intern at NASA Langley with a salary range of $44,615 to $75,376.

Kyle Ellis found a path to NASA while an engineering student at the University of Iowa studying the human factors involved in aviation. Lab work led to a 10-week NASA internship in 2008, he said, then to a graduate student research fellowship under what would become the Pathways program.

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NASA Langley aims for younger workforce