What it's like to work at NASA

dream job to dreaming about another job

I grew up wanting to be an Astronaut. Maybe it was the romanticism of the job. Being one of a select few people able to travel and live outside the atmosphere of Earth. Maybe I also just wanted to escape my life because I had a rough childhood. Those dreams though I knew could be reality. I could never be an astronaut. Who was I kidding. We all know this. Can you imagine me taking orders and following the rules? Honestly, I wouldn’t even pick me. That's why it's kind of funny that I wound up at NASA working as a scientist. In case you were wondering, I didn’t follow the rules or take orders well. See, I was right all along.

After graduate school I was pretty jaded with academic science. The whole idea that scientific work is only good when it can be published just didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to do work that had an application and an end goal in the near future. While applying around for jobs I ended up learning about NASA’s NPP fellowship program in which you write some crazy proposal about a research project you would do to support NASA’s mission to colonize the universe and subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto and they select a few people to come work at NASA. My proposal was about using genetically engineered light controlled organisms to harden Martian regolith in a patterned way based on how you shined light on them. (Mars technically doesn’t have soil because there is no organic material. Instead their “soil” is just broken up rocks which is called regolith) Basically, you would be able to 3D print any shape brick by simply dumping bacteria on the ground of Mars and shining patterned light onto it. Sounds insane. Like even for me. But they liked it so I received a Fellowship to work at NASA. Fuck, that was exciting. I no longer had to work in a shitty academic lab anymore and pretend to be self-righteous about how important my “fundamental research” would one day contribute to science. I was a NASA scientist researching things for the cosmos!