20-Year Prospect
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a...oh, wait, it actually is a plane.
Aerospace engineers aren't just for Airbus and Boeing anymore, though. While these dudes and dudettes will probably still be hammering out the bugs on the Dreamliner twenty years from now, you'll also find them involved in way cooler gigs, like designing spaceships for civilian spaceflight.
What should these spaceships be built out of? What should they look like? How many people and how much payload should they be able to carry? The masterminds at Virgin Galactic already have some interesting answers to these questions: They've built a couple of carbon composite spaceships that are fuel efficient and give passengers not one, but two, windows to look out of while sailing through space, all for the low, low ticket price of $250,000 per person.
Of course, this doesn't mean there'll be legions of aerospace engineers in the years ahead. A number of manufacturing industries affiliated with aerospace engineering are disappearing, so there won't be much room for growth in this career field.
But if stuff that flies is your thing, then rejoice—aerospace engineering as a whole shows no signs of crashing and burning.