Aerospace Engineering Junior Dawn Andrews in a wind tunnel at Georgia Tech.
Dawn Andrews20 year old Dawn Andrews usually makes her summer cash with babysitting gigs. But this year's going to be a little different.
The aerospace engineering major is headed to SpaceX headquarters outside Los Angeles for her first summer internship.
Andrews is SpaceX's 2017 'Brooke Owens Fellow' – one of 36 undergraduate women working in paid positions at aviation and space companies across the country. Other young ladies in the inaugural class of fellows will join up with brands including Orbital ATK, Blue Origin, and Virgin Orbit.
Here are a few of the Georgia Tech junior's hottest tips on how to get in with the Mars-bound crew at SpaceX – the company promising to start up its space tourism program in 2018:
Step One: Get Out The Lego Bucket
Andrews started her engineering career early. She says building little Lego vehicles was kind of her thing as a kid, and the pure joy of building something brand new still entices her today:
“It's great to see hands-on work come to life,” Andrews says. Toying around runs in the family, too: The budding builder's dad is also an engineer from Georgia Tech.
Step Two: Love Math
“I like things that make sense” Andrews says, “STEM fields have always just been my sort of thing.”
The piano player and drum major says she's always liked finding the reason behind the way the world works, and plugging away at math and physics puzzles in school. But it wasn't until she joined up with one of the aerospace engineering labs on campus in college that she discovered how much she enjoyed the challenge of designing and building tools for space.
“There's so much that we still don't know and there's so much potential for the future,” Andrews says.
She's looking forward to figuring out how to 3-D image the surface of a planet or a moon, and using science and math to get more people up in space:
“A lot of the time it feels like sci-fi to me, but that's the cool part about it," Andrews says.
Step Three: Make Space Toast
Andrews can't wait to put a “loaf of bread” up in space.
She's helping engineer what's called a 'CubeSat' – it's a small, low-cost satellite for space research.
What's the easiest way to describe a CubeSat? “They look like a loaf of bread,” Andrews says. “They're pretty tiny, but they're a great way to get your first taste of space vehicles.”
The handheld, 11-pound TARGIT nanosatellite Andrews has been working on at Georgia Tech's Space Systems Design Laboratory will likely blast into space sometime between 2018-2020, rideshareing the trip to outer space along with a NASA payload.
“It's definitely cool to work with things that will eventually be flying around in space,” Andrews says.
The mini-size research vessel will experiment with new ways to use LiDAR sensors (radar with lights) to take pictures. Andrews hopes this kind of research might be a first step toward figuring out new ways to map the topography of faraway moons and asteroids. It'll be a few years before we can see what kinds of 3-D photos TARGIT sends back from space, but it's just one more way engineers might refine and develop better LiDAR technology – which is the same tool set at work in some vision systems for driverless cars.
“It really feels like we're changing the world for the better,” Andrews says.
Step Four: Dream Big
Andrews is especially excited by the complex engineering challenges that come with heading out of this world:
“When are we going to get to Mars?” she asks. “I really do believe that it's a question of when, not if.” That's certainly something she and Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO with an eye on colonizing The Red Planet, can agree on.
