The New Blue Collar Worker

I was reading this article about NASA's new focus on returning to the moon, and the different vehicles that will be required for moon travel. The author sounds like something halfway between a crank and an armchair quarterback, but the part that really gave me a laugh was as his rant is winding to a close:

Therefore, the United States will have to come up with a 21st century replacement for Saturn V or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And the boost in basic engineering skills and domestic production capacity this will require will demand some degree of reorientation away from the white collar, intellectual skills of the software designers back to the hard-hat, blue collar, iron, steel, and volatile fuel technologies of the old Huntsville and Cape Canaveral rocket engineers.

Excuse me??? For the last 30 years, "rocket scientest" has been synonymous with most extreme form of geeky egghead. Now all of a sudden they're Ford-driving, lunch-pail-toting blue-collar workers? Gimme a break.