Comments | delta_november: The Other Thing in the Desert

delta_november

The Other Thing in the Desert

Jun 22, 2014 16:11

With great regret I have canceled my annual pilgrimage to the Utah desert to help students safely launch big rockets. None of the usual suspects will be there this year, and I can't face the idea of five lonely nights in a motel right now. I wasn't really looking forward to the 20 hours of flying, or the logistics of getting a rental vehicle to ( Read more... )

Comments 7

probabilistic June 23 2014, 01:03:55 UTC

That's really odd (your last statement). Can I ask...where are these teams from?

delta_november June 23 2014, 01:18:48 UTC

Last year Waterloo were the most egregious offenders. Not happy about that at all. Were unable to see past KS being a decorative object and realize that her structural engineer roles on STS and Ares make her a person who should be respected -- by the team who's rockets regularly fall apart on the pad!

delta_november June 23 2014, 01:20:49 UTC

Addendum:
The correct response to an experienced space person not being very much older than you is not disrespect. It's an intense curiosity as to how they have come so far in such a short time and how might you emulate them.

Kids these days :(.

probabilistic June 23 2014, 01:38:16 UTC

Some of it is probably insecurity. Not an excuse though.

kiwano June 23 2014, 17:42:40 UTC

...and yet you're the only male space-worker who I know

- first stranger I made out with at Burning Man was an engineer who (at the time) was working on the JADE instrument on the JUNO probe,
- one of the artist-jewelers who was a member of my makerspace when I joined also did soldering for spacecraft as a day job
- another friend from said same makerspace used to be an engineer who worked on some sort of aerospace engines (I forget if they were jets or rockets) before she got sick of working in a constant state of parts/tools poaching between the various teams in her lab, and decided to go back to school for a PhD in psych instead
- my sister is most of the way through her training to start piloting the DSCS constellation as an officer in 3 SOPS

until reading this post, I was under the impression that space was actually a relatively woman-friendly place (to the point where I'd rather see my daughter develop an interest in space than in software for that reason alone--never mind that space is just plain cooler) *sigh*

delta_november June 23 2014, 19:32:53 UTC

Lady #2 is my head technician :).

Please don't despair for your daughter's space future. probabilistic and I have talked about this before, but I think under friends-lock. The upshot is that while the space business isn't perfect in this regard, it's probably a good deal better than the software business ( ... )

kiwano June 27 2014, 17:41:06 UTC

I had a hunch that Toronto's space industry just plain isn't big enough for you to have some sort of (strong) professional connection to Lady #2 :)

I'm glad to hear that the poor culture is mostly isolated to that one event (nowhere's perfect, and I'm hard pressed to think of an industry that isn't better than software). I'll keep trying to get my sister more niece-time :)