Bringing Change to our Largest Social Network

Last spring, my former supervisor at NASA, Beth Beck, pointed me to a new scholarship competition that GovLoop (a social media network for government employees) was running. For my entry, I wrote an essay on my aspirations to break down the barriers in government through the use of technology and social networking. As it turns out, my essay has been selected as a finalist and is now up for voting. I’ve cross-posted it below. If you like it, please go over to GovLoop, check out some of the other finalists, and vote – I’d love your support!

Far too often, it seems that Americans have the perception of their government being a monolithic block, incapable of progress, change, or efficient functionality. While this may be true in some cases, it’s not something that should be allowed to continue. American government lacks the trust of its citizens, and the goal of getting it back should be our top priority.

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Sharing Space

I know that much of the success I’ve enjoyed in my life and my career is because of the support and encouragement I’ve received along the way.  That’s why I think it’s important to share my passion for space with kids and show them what they can accomplish if they are willing to work for it.

Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity and privilege to volunteer with both the United Space School and the International Space Settlement Design Competition.  Both programs bring students from around the world here to Houston to participate in exercises geared towards the design of future ventures in space.

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The time has come: leaving the Shuttle Program

Cross posted and adapted from original at the SpaceTweep Society

Note: I am posting this because I want people to see a realistic view of things at NASA, not a sugar-coated version. This is as real as it gets.

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The challenge and the opportunity

“Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac

The new NASA budget is a fundamental challenge to the way we operate in the human spaceflight community.  It asks us to stop expecting Washington or another JFK to tell us what to do and demands that we determine what we can offer the nation and set out to break as many boundaries as we can, while respecting the fiscal realities this country faces.

We can either fight this “paradigm shift,” as some have called it, or we can embrace it and make it our own.  Human space exploration is not going to die because of the cancellation of the Constellation program.  The American human space program itself will only die if we fail to rise to this challenge.  The NASA community has core assets and capabilities, such as the premier ability of JSC’s Mission Operations Directorate to conduct launch, ascent, and reentry of human crews, that must be conserved and shared if we are to succeed.

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Time to Grow Up

So maybe being 35 it might be time for me to start thinking about growing up.

I don’t mean getting stodgy or conservative or saying things like, “because we have always done it that way” but I mean giving up some of the tactics that I honed at a young age to survive the wilds of Junior High that might not be so appropriate anymore.  You see in Junior High I was picked on mercilessly by some of the guys (who my teachers assured me were only doing it because they were threatened by me- fat lot of consolation that was when I would go home crying every day). My survival strategy became to be as cool as possible. Luckily I had an older sister who through osmosis I could learn from and start to take on the ways of the cool rebel kids. I shaved the sides and back of my hair, wore dark lipstick and high top skater shoes.

It has served me well over the years. Although I took all honors and AP classes in high school, I escaped nerdom, played sports, and once I hit 9th grade never got picked on again. In college, I had fun, did what I wanted and took on my career fearlessly. I was not usually intimidated by a room full of senior engineers once I got to NASA because, hey, they were not nearly as cool as me. Heck I even created a whole space holiday around being cool.

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Welcome to 2010

So if there is one thing I have learned it is that the future doesn’t just come. It has to be built, dream by dream, gadget by gadget, conversation by conversation.

I got over the disappointment of 2000, the 2000 I had been waiting for since I was about 8. No flying cars, no exclusively silver wardrobes, no weekend trips to space. But what I took away was a resolve to get everyone excited not just about The Future but about being part of the group of people who are building the future. That is who we are. Never forget that. We are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams. We are the architects of a future for our species that inspires us. We build because we can, because it is our favorite game. It is not a better game than the players of the sports games, or the money game or even the video game. It is merely the one that we find the most fun. (So let’s play!)

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Doing my part

Cross-posted at Cosmo.Sphere

One of the advantages of working in the ISS National Laboratory Office is that I get to support projects that actually fly in space.  This morning, I got to sit with my Department of Defense counterparts on-console while astronaut Mike Barratt operated the SPHERES experiment.

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Launch Scrubbed, but Go to Post

So an hour ago, I showed up at the ISS Mission Evaluation Room to watch the shuttle launch. Last night, a friend of mine was asking me if I was going to get up at 6 AM to watch the launch. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about doing it, but realized that I had to option to go into my console in the MER and not only watch it on a nice big flat screen but I could also hear the other voice loops beyond PAO and CAPCOM if I watched it in the MER and used my headset.

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ACDC Rock

So for quite some time now I have seen the Lunar Lander as the project of choice that I see myself working on in my career in the mid-term.  I have been getting familiar with the Constellation architecture since ESAS was released, and I am hitting the workforce at the Altair sweet spot. Plus, working at Boeing, Orion is out. Ares rockets don’t really get my blood going as much as the lander either.

Sometime during fall of last year, I was perusing the AIAA library and I came upon a paper that some Boeing guys had published in conjunction with the NASA Altair Broad Area Announcement (BAA) regarding the trade space for the physical configuration of the Altair vehicle. There were half a dozen Boeing authors, and one of them happened to be in Houston.

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The Other Side of the “Inclusion” Issue

Over the past few weeks here at OpenNASA (and a few at NASAWatch), there have been a few debates about “Gen Y/Net Gen/Next Gen/Gen Next” wanting to be included more in how individual NASA centers (and NASA as a whole) are run.  At the very least, they (really “we” since I’m included in Gen Y, if only by age) would like a seat at the table, as it were, and a voice to speak with.  Whether or not mid – high level NASA managers actually listen to said voice  is something else to be discussed at another time, but for the time being it looks like they are at least paying attention.

I bring this issue up for a few reasons:
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