New career path

I can’t believe I didn’t write here for so long. Welp, can’t help what’s done already, I’ll try to document all the cool stuff that’s happening right now at&around myself, iGEM and Genspace a bit more. I’m officially a team member of the NYC-iGEM team and there are plenty of real biology being done at Genspace now that we’re public and all. I just have so much to write about.

But first, let me give you a news, this is the one that got me writing on this blog again after months of vacation:

Virgin Galactic is hiring astronauts! Not just any astronaut, but a private astronaut presumably for their SpaceShipOne based launch program at Mojave spaceport.

You need all the qualifications usually associated with being hired as a pilot for any Aerospace corp, with preference given to those with real experience in spaceflight. I guess all those out of work astronauts from the space shuttle program can still get their flight on 🙂

I kept asking myself why I didn’t go to a flight school instead of bothering with all this physics baloney. I think my friend who does aeronautical engineering thinks the same way too. I was more or less blaming my own shortsightedness before I hit upon a memory from decade ago.

I wanted to go to space, become an astronaut. That meant I had to enroll in the airforce, go through the officer’s training, and get really, really lucky. Now luck part I never really had a problem with. Don’t worry about things you can’t control, as they say. But enrolling and spending my life in the military just to get to space? Man that just put me way off. It’s probably the same story with my engineer friend. And I’m not even sure what women go through when they want to become an astronaut. I’m thinking it’s something a lot more different from what males have to go through, whether we want to admit it or not.

I’m not really crazy about the idea of libertarian capitalism, but I can’t help but to welcome this development of private space industries. I think years of treating space as if it was a special military domain really killed lots of initiatives that could have happened, and just shelved decades worth of scientific progress under the guise of national security (for all nations with capacity for spaceflight, really).