Unofficial Tex Murphy

How much schooling did that take?

I poke my head in now and then, but i've always been a bit of a lurker

Sam that still sounds like a very cool job - there must be tons of kids at schools that want to grow up and do that someday.

As for peeps, I guess I'm guilty of having been away a few days, and there's little to report.

Hopefully something exciting will happen soon.

Well actually I think most kids in school would rather be astronauts. I know that's what I used to want to be. Of course not everybody is physically cut out for the astronaut core. Sadly I'm only 4'10" and have a problem with motion sickness so that pretty much ruled me out early on. Haha.

But I figured the 2nd best way to get into the space program is being an aerospace engineer.

lestat, engineering school takes about 4-5 years to get your bachelors. I worked for a while and then decided to go back and get a masters (1.5 years). Masters aren't required but helpful.

So then, what kind of work does that make you available for?

Sounds like a cool job just the same.

It just goes to show that Tex doesn't fit just one or a couple specific types... We have people of all ranges of work background...

I'll tell ya, I was very impressed to hear what some of the people here did for a living when I first joined this community...

Sitting there thinking, these people are into video games this much, this is amazing...

Well today was a dismal failure. Ten hours at mission control and the launch gets scrubbed. Now I have to do it again tomorrow. These are the days when it's a sucky job.

Hey sorry for the crazy, cranky post. I was all wound up from getting off work. Just managed to get some sleep and am feeling more myself now.

Whoa Jim that's a big question. Aerospace engineers can do a variety of stuff. We basically deal with fluids. Fluids is a broad category that covers both gases and liquids. We can work on airplanes, missiles, rockets, helicopters, even cars or anything that travels through the air. At the same time we can work on things that go through water as well such as submarines, torpedoes, etc. It's basically the same problem for us because a dense object is traveling through a less dense environment.

That being said there are different flavors of engineering. You can be a designer who make drawings, an analyst that crunches numbers (that's me), a test engineer who runs wind tunnel tests, an engineer that builds hardware for a syterm, or an engineer that writes software for a system.

So there's stuff to do but to do strictly space stuff the choices are limited. There are private companies that actually do it but right now that's mostly with funding/direction from NASA. I don't know how the future is going to turn out when they will not be relying on NASA as much.

So Sam, give us the inside scoop... Just heard that the new Moon Missions have been Scrubbed along with the Shuttle program... So what's the Future of NASA looking like???

News sure wasn't painting a pretty picture, but then again the news never does if they can bump ratings by making things look so negative...

Well Bafitis,
The point of view depends on which NASA center you work for. Johnson Space Center is feeling a little glum but they will probably pull through. They do research projects in addition to working shuttle so they've got other stuff to fall back on. They will also still be working Space Station work as that will continue. The astronaut core will shrink because they will be relying on the Russians to launch up one astronaut at a time.

But at Kennedy Space Center the mood is very depressing. The guys here are very heart-broken since they do mostly launch support. Once they stop launching shuttles they will have to shut down most of the work that they do. They'll still be launching commercial satellites but that won't require any where the amount of people they have now for shuttle. I fear this Cape Canaveral will become a ghost town.

Other NASA centers will probably shrink a little but be able to continue on since they do research and smaller science projects which is where the new NASA funding will be directed towards improving.

I work for Boeing which is a fairly big aerospace company so I'll probably have to choose a different area of the company to work in the future. I just hope I don't get stuck working on weapons systems and missiles. I'd hate the thought of building stuff that kills people.

What's the NASA center up here in Maryland do???

Like I suggested before, you could always go into the Private Sector... Since they will be letting Space Flight go to the Private Sector, I'm sure many experienced people will be needed...

Bafitis, the Goddard Space Flght Center is a research center specializing in unmanned scientific spacecraft. They mostly study the Earth and Solar System. The will probably not be hurt by the shutdown of the shuttle program. They are the ones that manage the Hubble space telescope.

Kewl... I pass it every other weekend when I got to pick my son up from his visit with his mother, just never knew exactly what they did...

So they are the ones that tried to blow up the moon on purpose to prove there was water there and they did, only to have the Moon Missions Canceled... So basically the Hundreds of Millions of Dollars spent to blow a hole in the Moon was worthless since we won't be benefiting from it now...

If you are talking about the LCROSS mission that smashed a probe into the moon to find water, that mission was managed by NASA Ames in CA. Thankfully in terms of scientific research NASA doesn't put all it's eggs in one basket. I think science/space exploration will still continue. It's just the manned spaceflight part that is going to suffer the biggest hit.

Washington needs a Major Overhaul... The priorities and whatnot are just in the wrong places... And they sure as hell aren't thinking of the country when they make their decisions...