Thirty-Meter Telescope on Hawai'i

What I've been trying to work my way up to, this week, is discussion of the Thirty-Meter Telescope. It's... complicated, to say the least.

One of the first principles of intersectional work, is that anti-oppression should be led / centered by the voices that are directly affected by it. That being said, this is my blog / my space. So I'm going to begin with this great list of links: http://www.aoletmt.com/

And this Storify that Janet Stemwedel (@docfreeride) put together. My own analysis / processing will be below the cut.

Pay attention, in this Storify, to who are the kanaka maoli, the pre-European Hawaiian voices:

My own processing is below the cut, in two parts: 1) Who I am / Why I care, and 2) What I think.

This is a long post.

Systems View of Safety and Engineering Design

I'm pulling together my plan for blogposts this week, and it may prove a good capstone of the recent months' material. This weekend I caught up on the Safety Engineering portion of MITx 16.00 Introduction to Aerospace Engineering: Astronautics and Human Spaceflight.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I had dealt with software safety concerns in a previous position. Those concerns inspired me to study both IE 558: Safety Engineering and IE 577: Human Factors in Engineering. And yet I found myself disappointed, that they primarily focused on earth-based factory and office work, and barely got into the integrated (human-in-the-loop design) stories of major industrial accidents like the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster.

I was pleased to see that this MOOC takes the Systems View of Human Factors, System Safety, and Software Safety. I would encourage any engineers to connect to this MOOC just to watch the Unit 5 videos, if nothing else, because of the important discussion.

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.

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:

The week behind, the weeks to come

Last week was Spring Break for the entire county. We went up to Indiana to spend time with the grandparents.

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis is the world's largest children's museum, full of "Please touch" exhibits and hands-on activities, including science. Two of our favorite exhibits this visit were:

• Inside Hollywood Film & TV! You're On the Set and 
• Transformers: Robots in Disguise

We also, as usual, made a stop through the Power of Children exhibit, which I'll write about another time.

That also put us boots-on-the-ground when Indiana passed the so-called "Religious Freedom Restoration Act." There's still considerable activity about it on my Facebook feed, from our Indiana friends and relatives. Today's post would get too long if I started on that subject now.

Also, since I brought it up last Friday, the jury ruled against Ellen Pao on all counts.

For this week, I want to discuss a topic that came up on Twitter, and is near and dear to my heart. Dr. D.N. Lee (@DNLee5) is a Scientific American blogger and person I follow on Twitter, for diversity-in-STEM advocacy. I am working on a series of posts about this. Below the cut, I share links to other posts and some of the discussions that have taken place.