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tech / alt.astronomy / Former NASA Engineer’s Interesting Take on Women in Science (Beth Moses!)

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Former NASA Engineer’s Interesting Take on Women in Science (Beth Moses!)

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Subject: Former_NASA_Engineer’s_Interesting_Take_on_Women_
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https://news.wttw.com/2017/05/11/former-nasa-engineer-s-interesting-take-women-science

And Beth Moses just went into space!

Former NASA Engineer’s Interesting Take on Women in Science
Alex Ruppenthal | May 11, 2017 1:58 pm

Former NASA engineer Beth Moses is chief astronaut instructor at Virgin
Galactic, the world's first commercial spaceline. (YouTube / Virgin
Galactic)

Not long after joining Virgin Galactic in 2014 as its chief astronaut
instructor, former NASA aerospace engineer Beth Moses was asked to weigh
in on the topic of gender.

The question was not out of left field (or outer space), given that
women make up just 11 percent of aerospace engineers in the U.S.,
according to a 2013 study by the U.S. Census Bureau.

But the request caught Moses off guard.

“I got an email one day asking me to write a blog about my issues with
gender in the workplace,” said Moses, who grew up in Northbrook and is
tasked with training customers of the world’s first commercial
spaceline. “And I wrote an email back saying, ‘Well, I guess I’ve never
had any.’”

Moses’ resulting blog post, titled “Women in STEM – why engineers don’t
come in pink or blue,” was a stream-of-consciousness release that she
says still reflects her stance on the topic.

“I have never really noticed any diversity variables or factors,” Moses
told Chicago Tonight. “Like, I’ve never really noticed the number of
women or the number of any given minority because the projects I’ve done
have been so global in nature. And if you stop and you think and you
count heads, you go, ‘Oh look, there were only two women in that room.’
But when you’re doing the job, you never notice it. It’s just a bunch of
engineers in the room trying to solve a problem, right?”

Moses has solved some pretty big puzzles since beginning as an intern at
NASA in the early 1990s while still studying aerospace engineering at
Purdue University. At NASA, she started off designing mockups for
astronauts to test tools underwater. She eventually became the spacewalk
system manager for the International Space Station, leading a global
team responsible for designing and testing all hardware used by
astronauts to construct the ISS in orbit.

“One of the things that I believe in is that if a greater slice of
humanity can experience spaceflight, it will translate to untold
benefits and changes on Earth. What if every world leader saw Earth from
space? It might be a more gentle, kind planet.”

–Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor Beth Moses

This week, Moses returned home to receive the Women in Space Science
Award from the Women’s Board of the Adler Planetarium, which has
recognized trailblazing women in STEM fields (that’s science,
technology, engineering and mathematics) for 15 years. The board,
founded in 2002, also supports education and outreach programs to reach
underserved youth – with a special focus on young women – in STEM fields.

Beth Moses (Adler Planetarium)
Beth Moses (Adler Planetarium)
Moses is scheduled to receive the award Thursday during a reception at
the Drake Hotel. After the reception, Adler will host a group of about
250 young women from Chicago-area schools for an afternoon of STEM
workshops at the planetarium.

Chicago Tonight connected with Moses to discuss women in STEM fields,
designing tools for outer space, the future of space tourism and more.

Chicago Tonight: Where did your passion for building things – and for
space – come from?

Beth Moses: I just was always interested [in space and engineering].
When I was growing up, the space shuttle was launching, and it was
fascinating and phenomenal. I was always somewhat of an engineer, even
in my youth, I suppose. I was one of the kids that would go build the
model raceways and cobble together whatever I could from my brothers’
toys, usually. People always ask me, ‘What got you into it?’ I don’t
know. I just remember always loving it and always playing that way, and
nobody ever stopped me, which was wonderful. I guess I was a tomboy and
a bookworm and a little tinkerer.

CT: Did you always want to go to space?

BM: Oh, of course. Who doesn’t? It’s crazy if you don’t.

CT: Have you been to space?

BM: I have not. It’s extremely competitive, and the NASA program has
eyesight requirements that I didn’t meet. Nowadays, I think they accept
corrective surgery, but not throughout my career … But I’ve had the
great honor of engineering the International Space Station. I haven’t
gone yet, but I have my fingers crossed that I’ll get to go one day.

CT: How many women were in your aerospace engineering program at Purdue?

BM: Not very many. I was in the minority, but I wasn’t the only one.
Generally, in the larger classes, there were a handful of women. And
then as you got more specialized in your coursework, I was sometimes the
only woman in a classroom of 10 or 15 males. But frequently there was at
least one other lady in the room.

As part of Adler's Women in Space Science Award celebration, about 250
young women will participate in an afternoon of workshops at the
planetarium. (Adler Planetarium)
As part of Adler's Women in Space Science Award celebration, about 250
young women will participate in an afternoon of workshops at the
planetarium. (Adler Planetarium)

CT: What are your thoughts about the public dialogue and media coverage
around the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields?

BM: With full respect to your profession, I find it irrelevant, really.
At least in the projects I’ve done. So a headline says, oh, we have a
shortage of female engineers or there isn’t much female representation
at certain levels. But day to day, if you’re doing the job and your
teachers and your bosses and your colleagues and those under you are
both men and women and both local and global, you don’t notice it and
you don’t care. You just get on with the job, right? I mean, I’ve never
felt singled out. You just do the job. It really doesn’t matter who you
are; it matters that you know your [stuff].

CT: Would you like to see more women in your field?

BM: I would like the aerospace field to include anyone who is attracted
to it and capable. If there are other women who would like to
participate, I would love for the field to welcome them. I don’t know
that it doesn’t.

CT: How did you start at NASA, and what kind of work did you do?

BM: I started as an engineer designing mockups for underwater testing
and then I eventually grew to lead the entire global effort that
designed and tested all the hardware to make sure that it could be
assembled in orbit and then maintained. And actually, I’m super proud:
It all fit together. Not everything fit together originally. It all had
to fit together in space even though we could never plug it all together
on the ground. So that’s a bit of a trick, right?

CT: Um, yeah …

BM: You have to understand how the hardware behaves when it goes through
hot and cold cycles of day and night – and is in a vacuum in the same
time. So things like power cables get stiff, and different cables get
stiff in different ways, and some of them shorten. So you have to
understand, is it going to be stiff? Is it going to be too short? Things
like fluid lines – fluid lines were the worst part of the space station
– high-pressure ammonia lines that are designed to survive in space for
decades, and yet a human in a spacesuit has to manipulate them, line
them up and connect them. It would be like if your garden hose was your
worst nightmare high-pressure garden hose and you couldn’t get it to
point where you wanted to – and you’re in a spacesuit. So to [design]
that, you literally put a human in a spacesuit in a thermal vacuum
chamber and you make the hardware hot and cold and pressurized – just
like it would be in space – and you use it in a spacesuit to learn how
it should be built. Does that make sense?

CT: Yep, sure ... So, you’re working to develop the astronaut training
program at Virgin Galactic. Where does that stand?

BM: The program for pre-flight training is still being developed and
tested. So I have not started to train any future astronauts. I have
started to consult with future astronauts about what they expect out of
their training, what they expect out of their flight, answering
questions, getting to know them, that kind of thing. My portion of the
training is the training the week before you fly, essentially. We
haven’t started customer flights, so my program will start when we start
customer flights.

CT: Does Virgin Galactic have an estimate on when customer flights will
begin?

BM: No, we don’t. It will be as soon as is safely possible. And after
the conclusion of our flight-test program, we will relocate the program
from California, where we’re flight testing, to New Mexico, and then
we’ll start customer flights.

CT: Who are the customers that have signed up for the flights?

BM: There are over 700 of them. They are all private individuals from I
think 58 different countries who have all paid either a deposit or in
most cases the full price for a ticket on Virgin Galactic. The price is
$250,000. But I’ll tell you, there’s a fallacy that they are all high
net-worth individuals. In actuality, that’s not the case. The stereotype
of a billionaire astronaut or a high net-worth traveler is pretty much a
stereotype. We have future astronauts from all walks of life, all means
– folks that have mortgaged their homes to fly with us; folks that have
saved for a decade to fly with us; folks that have taken out personal loans.


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