Astronaut Selection
astronauts.nasa.gov
astronauts.nasa.gov
Five hours is more than enough. Five hours is enough time for the writers to take a genre, deconstruct it, salt the earth, collect all the pieces in one place and build a bonfire, dance around the flames thrice widdershins while invoking ancient and mysterious rites, take off and nuke the site from orbit (just to be sure)... and finally, on the site of the wreck, rebuild it all again more beautiful than it had ever been, in the process winning every award in the book and forever altering the future of the genre.
But then, maybe I've just been utterly spoiled by Puella Magi Madoka Magica (12 episodes, 300m). :b
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/European...
Being an astronaut sounds pretty cool, but personally I don't even feel very comfortable in a plane, hence sitting in a rocket with 500,000 kg of explosives underneath me is not something I would really consider doing, independent of the fact that it's of course doubtful if I would even physically/psychologically qualify for such a task. I hope though that as I get older space travel will become both safer and more affordable, because I would really love to see our planet from outside its atmosphere, even if just for a minute.
From http://www.federaljobs.net/salarybase.htm#SALARY_TABLE_2015-... it sounds like civilian astronaut salaries then range from $51k to $112k per year. That feels pretty low, but presumably astonauts assigned to a mission can make money through public speaking, etc.
As somebody who knows many current and former astronauts (lived a stone's throw from JSC for 20+ years)... I can assure you that astronauts picking up money for appearances is fairly uncommon. A majority are incredibly low-profile, publicity-wise. If they show up to an event to speak, it's almost always because they personally feel compelled to advocate for research, education, the space program in general, etc.
Nobody applies to be an astronaut to get rich, but for a well-educated person $150k in pay and benefits is absolutely possible, which is a great paycheck, especially in Houston.
The GS grades are not about education, but job responsibility. The grade for a given position also depends on the agency you're working for and where. An engineer with the AF working for ACC might be a GS-11, but a GS-12 if they switched to AFMC, or GS-13 if they did the same job with AFMC at another base.
I misread the GS site, you are correct.
Still quite a bit above the median in terms of salary, which was my only real point (and that if you are primarily motivated by money, advanced degrees and Federal government employment is probably not in your future, anyway).
As for post-astro careers: my understanding is that a number of astronauts have gone on to academia.
In addition, the demand for astronauts is astronomically low :), so the supply of people wanting to do it is very high compared to demand.
Think about scuba diving instructors. They don't make that much money because it's such an awesome job. If I could make 150k a year doing that, I would quit my job in a heartbeat, move to Hawaii and never look back. However, they don't because if they started paying that much, a million other people would do the same, flooding the market with scuba instructors which would shift the salary back to what it is now.
A lot of HN readers seem really, seriously out of touch on the income front.
http://www.space.com/26799-nasa-astronauts-psychological-eva...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nat...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_%28book%29
Interesting.
(note: I'm not an English native speaker)
Unfortunately, I don't have any experience flying jet aircraft. So the challenge is meant for someone else...
They also don't seem to need computer scientists :\
I had a job at an IT outsourcing shop several years ago. Before I got there, one guy administered some 50 Debian / Ubuntu servers. They needed two Windows guys to maintain half as many Windows servers.
There are good configuration management tools for both systems, and both systems are good at what they do. Just seems there's more awful things running on your average Windows server.
What they need is to send people into space that are smart enough to understand the myriad systems around the, maintain them, and conduct the various experiments and other tasks planned. Basically, they're looking for smart people that they can train to have the needed skills, rather than people that have the needed skills outright. (Since nobody actually does.)
A pure CS degree might put you at (an overcomeable) disadvantage, since they seem to value the ability to do experimental science. But it can and has been overcome, see:
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/chamitoff.html
Also, note that astronauts tend to be selected late in life - mid-30s and early-40s - since NASA likes accomplished people.
Late in life? Can't speak for everyone, but my life expectancy is considerably longer than my early-40s.
Some grandiose ideas are fun but they get you nowhere and leave you worse off as they represent a gigantic mis-allocation of capital.
The ability to set up colonies in space has very little to do with star trek fandom (I can't stand it so no 'star trek' fan here). It is a way to expand our envelope, to reduce our viewpoint of Earth as a special place in the universe (it's only special to us right now) and it will, in the longer term yield dividends in ways that we probably can not even think of today, just like Columbus probably had no idea of the magnitude of the future consequences of his voyage.
If every bit of research or every human activity to date would be viewed with the eye towards immediate economic sense then we'd still be hunter gatherers living in Africa, all of us.
Discovery, curiosity and a drive to expand our envelopes both in a physical sense and in a mental sense are valuable too, even if they don't show up next week on some balance sheet of humanity, Inc.
The Potential of successful colonization of another planet is a total unknown, just like the potential of colonizing another continent is a total unknown. At least we know the other planet exist, whereas America was a bit of a surprise for Columbus.
Letting economic calculations guide you in the day-to-day running of a business is fine. But we as humanity can afford a little bit of money set aside for things that have no immediate value. Art and culture are amongst our most valuable possessions, but their value seems to be appreciating with time relative to the time when they were created. Much of our scientific knowledge had no immediate value at the time of discovery.
Columbus voyage may have made 'perfect sense' from an economic perspective in hindsight because it worked, but there was no guarantee that it would and plenty of people were arguing this was a waste of resources at the time.
I'm just as proud or more so of what humanity has achieved when economic gain wasn't the immediate focus as I am of the things we've achieved when economic gain was at the forefront of our thoughts guiding us to make our decisions. There is room for both of those.
Well, my experience of large scale EU funding programmes was that all the efforts to predict the economic yield of research projects was, at best, complete nonsense.
After all, who thought that by funding a nuclear research organisation (CERN) we'd get something like the Web? Has anyone got an economic model that could have predicted that?
Not to mention the fact that if there'd been an interest in following modern procedures (that obviously didn't exist at the time), perhaps genocide by disease might have been avoided.
What's the official stance of historians on this? I thought that it was an intentional biological strike.
(Even if one must be cynical, let us be fully cynical, not conveniently partially cynical: Historically speaking there was little compunction about simply killing people. Distributing infected blankets is an awfully roundabout and even dangerous-to-the-distributors way of doing something there was a much simpler way to do. I'd say "imagine the way we think of bird flu today" but back then the putative blanket infectors would be even more terrified of smallpox than that.)
I don't see a way accidental-genocide-by-disease could have been avoided. It only takes one sneeze to set off a powderkeg tens of thousands of years in the making. It was unfortunately structurally inevitable. (Inconceivably, beyond words "unfortunate", but still, inevitable.) It's hard to call it deliberate when I would frankly question our ability today to prevent it; very similarly, witness the number of invasive species that have been put into ecosystems even when we have known better and tried to avoid it. It just takes one action at the right place and the right time, and boom, exponential biological explosion.
Like what? Trade routes on earth have predictable results - if they found a place to trade or a route to somewhere already existing, that's only to be expected.
There's nothing to trade with in space; there's no way we're having a colony on Mars making plastic trinkets and rocketing them back to Earth for sale, or buying Coca Cola rocketed from Earth.
I grant that you can't think of "dividends which we can't think of today", but what categories are you even speculating about? What even might there be?
NASA's budget for 2014 was $17.647 billion, which is approx 0.5% of US federal government spending [1].
Total ESA budget for 2015 was €4.28 billion (US$5.51 billion) [2].
Everyone else (including Russia) spends not very much at all.
[1] http://usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/FY2015_Budg...
Homelessness is certainly an important problem, but is it more important than (for example) tackling antibiotic resistance ($450 million budget in FY2014 [1])? For any deserving issue/problem it is possible to play this game all day, as illustrated by the Fallacy of relative privation [2].
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
No machine can come back and tell you how it felt to be there. How the Apollo 8 crew reacted the first time they looked back and saw the distant Earth as a planet, no different than the Moon ahead of them. Or how was it to be completely cut off from all of mankind while behind the Moon. Or to take that now famous earthrise picture.
There are two things here. The first, is the quest for knowledge. About how things are and how things became. Robots can do that wonderfully well.
The other is the quest for our place in the vastness of space. One is the quest for knowledge, for information. The second is the quest for meaning. No machine will give us that.
What useful stuff can we mine from the moon or from asteroids?
Lots of stuff.
Although asteroids and Earth accreted from the same starting materials, Earth's relatively stronger gravity pulled all heavy siderophilic (iron-loving) elements into its core during its molten youth more than four billion years ago.[9][10][11] This left the crust depleted of such valuable elements until a rain of asteroid impacts re-infused the depleted crust with metals like gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium and tungsten (some flow from core to surface does occur, e.g. at the Bushveld Igneous Complex, a famously rich source of platinum-group metals). Today, these metals are mined from Earth's crust, and they are essential for economic and technological progress. Hence, the geologic history of Earth may very well set the stage for a future of asteroid mining.
But I think the exciting part is that you have raw materials outside of Earth's gravity well. It's really expensive to haul stuff up, so a source of water in high orbit is really valuable if you want to do space stuff.
I mean, we currently fashion a decent chunk of gold into useless trinkets.
The moon is thought contain Helium 3 which can be used for fusion reactors.[2]
[1]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110907132044.ht...
[2]http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Preparing_for_the_Future/S...
[0] - http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2015/07/19/trillion-dol...