February 9, 2004
A: FROM MENTOR JOAN LUSK IN RI
At the big, organizational level NASA must include all sorts of occupations
on the business side. It seems they need good managers, too, who create a
climate where engineers and scientists are heard. But as a GEM-SET member
you are most likely interested in the scientific careers at NASA. Getting
payloads into space is basically an engineering problem and it must involve
a wide range of expertise - not just (literally) rocket science but people
who understand materials and their behavior in cold and heat. They need
people to train the astronauts as well as needing the astronauts
themselves. Somebody decides which experiments should go into space and
somebody probably works with the original proposerst o better adapt the
experiments to the space environment.

NASA's site includes a page called "Want to work at
NASA?" http://www.nasa.gov/about/career/index.html with links for people
with all sorts of backgrounds and advice for kids from Sally Ride :
http://kids.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2002/news-bykids-Ride.asp
She'll tell you to keep studying math and science if you want to be an astronaut.
"I think the advice that I would give to any kids who want to be
astronauts is to make sure that they realize that NASA is looking for
people with a whole variety of backgrounds: they are looking for medical
doctors, microbiologists, geologists, physicists, electrical engineers. So
find something that you really like and then pursue it as far as you can
and NASA is apt to be interested in that profession."