Slashdot Mirror

I wrote this:

http://rocketforge.org/?p=436

a few years ago. As a co-founder of Masten Space Systems I would get this question frequently enough that I wrote a standard blog article about it. Here's the gist:

Work for NASA but leave before it makes you cynical.
Work in Mojave but leave or else you’ll never get married.
No matter what, build something.
Internships!
Go to some key conference and meet people
Use LinkedIn, VisualCV, and yes, Facebook
Know your industry intimately
Join Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS)
Go get an advanced degree. Get it from the International Space University (ISU) if you can
Become an expert at something
Do something risky
Spectacularly fail at something
Be LOUD about it!

I should point out mhmealling has some good commentary of his own here.

A couple more SA'04 trip reports from attendees:
Michael Mealling blogged the conference almost live over at RocketForge
Alan Boyle at MSNBC's Cosmic Log writes about both the conference and whats yet to come this summer. In a followup post he also mentions an X-Prize team that has has made some significant progress while remaining under the media radar.
Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings also has a short post on SA'04 first and then some significant insights into legislative aspects.

For what it's worth, I found this article on incremental testing and rocket design to be something of an eye-openner. He points out that once you start out building rockets the way NASA started, you are very unlikely to experiment with a proven design. Extrapolating from that, I don't know if NASA ever would eventually develope similar technology to what the X-Prize contestants are doing.

I am excited about this prize program. Bush didn't mention it in his speech a while back, and I figured it would take some proven success by the non-government projects before tax money would start going to private enterprize so that they could experiment in ways NASA hasn't been able to do. Apparently it is starting to happen.

I'm keeping track of press coverage here.

RocketForge had a link to this posted 3 days ago! So I got to see the video before you guys slashdotted the server :-)