<story><title>Space things happening in 2021</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/?p=1730399</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ackbar03</author><text>I really feel space tech is gonna be the next big thing going forward, but I have zero clue about how to get involved. It seems like one of those things where you really need to either be some government agency or have a PhD in it or something.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Rebelgecko</author><text>Basically all space companies (oldspace, newspace) hire software folks. Some specific jobs might require PhDs, but most don&amp;#x27;t. Flight software sometimes has requirements for certain experience (e.g. Embedded). However, flight software is a surprisingly small sliver of all the space related software that gets written. Even though it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;outer space&lt;/i&gt; they still need GUIs for ground systems, CRUD apps for handling downlinked data, WebGL people to build fancy visualizations, etc</text></comment>
<story><title>Space things happening in 2021</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/?p=1730399</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ackbar03</author><text>I really feel space tech is gonna be the next big thing going forward, but I have zero clue about how to get involved. It seems like one of those things where you really need to either be some government agency or have a PhD in it or something.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>avmich</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s both pretty easy and insanely hard.&lt;p&gt;Insanely hard - from an engineer prospective - because there is a big gap between software disciplines and, ughm, &amp;quot;the real world&amp;quot;. When you&amp;#x27;re pushing bits, today it&amp;#x27;s easy to forget about the times when computers were quite unreliable, from the hardware point of view. Bad contacts? Unreliable memory bits? Overheating parts? Magnetic tape which loses data and paper media which breaks? Today most of this is factored away and engineers largely operate with logic. Try to do hardware projects - even easy Arduino-based designs will give you a glimp of difficulties you&amp;#x27;re going to get with space technology, and if you&amp;#x27;re trying something modestly interesting...&lt;p&gt;Pretty easy is because &amp;quot;rocket science isn&amp;#x27;t rocket science&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s technology invented more than a century ago - converging-diverging nozzle was invented about 150 years ago, about 120 years ago Tsiolkovsky wrote about liquid hydrogen fuel and multistage rockets, more than 90 years ago Goddard flew his first rockets, almost 80 years ago von Braun was already working on V-2, and this year we&amp;#x27;re celebrating 60th anniversary of Spootnik. A great deal of efforts went into perfection of rocketry, and now we know a lot - that&amp;#x27;s a big part of the reason why SpaceX moves so fast - and can do a lot.&lt;p&gt;Now you can have a nano-launcher startup for less than 100 million dollars - may be way less - which just couple of decades ago is unheard of. More, there are competitions - X Prize for flight 100 km up, Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Google Lunar Prize, and now, say, NASA&amp;#x27;s &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;breaktheicechallenge.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;breaktheicechallenge.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; - where you can participate with much smaller barrier to entry. The webinar from this last challenge - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=UXgdEDBTPJE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=UXgdEDBTPJE&lt;/a&gt; - contains references on other competitions NASA is hosting.&lt;p&gt;So, to conclude, if you&amp;#x27;re an engineering mind, especially capable of working outside of applied math of programming, the possibilities are certainly there to try in growing space industry.</text></comment>