Design Competitions relevant to Space Settlement

Continuing last week's post about Settling the Solar System, my Engineering Outreach page includes a list of STEM competitions that students could participate in and learn from. (Feel free to suggest others in the Comments.) One of these competitions is the International Space Settlement Design Competition, with regional and local events in many areas.

Gardening Takes Time

I said in my by-line that this blog would include gardening, but I don't have a lot of garden posts up. Gardens take a lot of work, and time to fill in nicely. I wanted to be sure I had something I could be proud of, and show off.

This is one corner of my garden, this week:

It's always nice to get compliments from the neighbors, on one's yard.

Last week, it wasn't quite as filled in:

Settling the Solar System

This week I've been touching on last week's Twitter conversation about the Narrative of Mars Colonization, based on this episode of Star Talk Radio: The Future of Humanity with Elon Musk.

It is interesting that Dr. D.N. Lee picked up on the problems of framing the discussion with phrases like "stuck on Earth", "save humanity", and "Manifest Destiny." The Storify of her discussion is here.

When I listened to the podcast, what I picked up on was the discussion about education of women as a means to reduce population growth. As I table that topic for a later discussion, let me just drop this link describing the concept of Reproductive Justice.

Yesterday I posted links to books and other resources discussing NASA culture. This morning I updated it with a few more items.

The first 7 astronauts were selected from U.S. military test pilots. This automatically excluded women, because even though women had been serving in combat since before 1776,  been pilots since 1908 (not just white women, Bessie Coleman earned her pilots license in 1922), and flown military aircraft since 1942, including as test pilots (if not earlier, since many of the barnstorming aircraft were WWI surplus), the first woman selected for military Test Pilot School happened in 1982.

The questions I see are:

Resources about NASA culture

This is taking me longer than I wanted.  I have said that NASA's civil servant culture (from the Contractor position) has looked like one of the best places for women to work. That's actually one of the reasons I want to work there. So I'm going to start out with some general comments about organization culture from my management coursework, and then provide links to some of the literature and stories that already exist and/or are coming soon.

The culture of any organization is influenced by the structure, the corporate / institutional culture, the work-group culture, the geographically local surrounding culture, and customer and supplier culture.  All of these, together, create subtle differences in individual experience. Houston is different from Huntsville, Boeing is different from Lockheed Martin.

There is a precedence for former engineers who have become writers, speakers, including Homer Hickam himself. I am considering that path, as I've seen openings and opportunities to write... but I am not ready to give up on my technical career yet.

For today, I'm going to point to existing resources: