The Space Shuttle is over. But the dream of space is alive and well—at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and on social news site Reddit.
And even as private efforts get under way to replace the Shuttle, it turns out that working at NASA is still a dream job for many.
Scientists from the NASA laboratory, posting under the long-established Reddit account hubblemedia, invited redditors to ask questions starting last Friday, and they kept rolling in over the weekend.
The AMA—”ask me anything”—request was met with great enthusiasm and several posts asking for jobs at NASA. Despite the ending of the Shuttle missions and budget cuts at NASA, the public of the Internet still dream of space exploration. Many claimed they’d be happy just making coffee, if it would support our endeavor into the final frontier.
Redditor Middens appeared ready to submit a resume, while Jazzandrew asked “Will watching Firefly qualify me for any positions?”
While not addressing that specific question, jplatwork suggested visiting the website findyourplace.jpl.nasa.gov: “There are hundreds of groups at JPL and elsewhere at NASA. Find the groups that interest you and apply to all of them. There is a job here for almost everyone.”
The original poster, hubblemedia, was overjoyed to see continued interest in NASA, and admitted “If it were up to me, anyone who had interest in helping Humanity’s space endeavors would be allowed on.”
In addition to their hopes of employment, redditors expressed concerns regarding the future of space travel as funded by private companies. The NASA contributors said they were excited for space travel to be funded by a variety of sources and the great opportunities this development will likely present.
However, they stressed that corporations fund for profit, as opposed to scientific institutions which exist for discovery.
“Should we put too much reliance on corporations we will find they are legally obligated to make as much money for their shareholders as possible, not obligated to expand the horizons of our knowledge,” said hubblemedia. (This may have prompted a later disclaimer added on to the topic description which noted that hubblemedia wasn’t speaking officially for NASA.)
In the most upvoted question, Aversusblack asked what NASA could do if they has the same budget as the Dept. of Defense. Hubblemedia joked that “We could probably do a reddit poll and take the top 10 (non lolcat) suggestions and just run with them all.”
Any odds that the top suggestion will be to hire a bunch of redditors?
