Various Futures

Earlier today our friends Becca and Sarah mused on their blogs about what they would do next if, for whatever reason, they stopped working at NASA. It's a reasonable question, as I think for the first time the question of whether the Shuttle will fly again after Discovery lands is not an easy one. It comes down to a matter of timing and resources. The plan was to return to flight, finish building what is needed on the space station, and then retire the shuttle. All by 2010. But if several months or even a year is needed to try to fix the shedding foam problem... is it worth the time and money to do so? I hate to leave a job unfinished, but I wonder if it would be a good decision to try again.

Anyways, what would I do if the Shuttle stopped flying? If I stayed with NASA, much of my work might not change that much. I help JPL with some of their Mars work, which I really enjoy and it means a lot to me, to be contributing to a mission that will be seeing things no one has ever seen before. I'm sure I'd be involved at some level with the new human spaceship to be used after Shuttle.

But what if I left NASA altogether? Hard to say. I think it would be fun to work for a start-up company like Blue Origin, but I'm not too interested in just helping people get to space. If it was a company interested in transoceanic suborbital flights, I might like that for a few years. I think that's the next big contribution that space technology can make to the world at large: deliver a package or a person from Los Angeles to Sydney in less than an hour.

I would strongly consider graduate school, either for something in optimal control theory or a physical science. Oceanography has always fascinated me. Come to think of it, naval engineering might be pretty fun too.

And I'd like to live some place with mountains. I miss them.