Welcome to the Sunday Paper Club. (Almost) Every Sunday, this blog will offer analysis of a paper on space habitation and other related topics. These are my opinions on a weekly scientific paper; basically I read the paper and write down my thoughts are I read it. They are subject to my perspectives and believes. I am open to debate, so if any reader believes I have misinterpreted something in a paper, please point it out. I'm only a student and I'm still learning how to read these papers and interpret them. All quotes are from the paper unless otherwise noted. All papers I review are available for free online.
This week we are reviewing the paper Involving Students in Engineering the Infrastructure of a Space-Based Economy.
The space industry is in trouble. Its workers are not getting any younger and there are less and less people entering the field. So the industry needs to attract and keep students interested. However, it is hard to keep students interested while they go through the 2 years of undergraduate training before they get into space related classes in their late college years. How can the space industry keep students motivated and use them as a resource to further the space community's goals?
The first suggestion the paper has is to inject space into lower classman, undergraduate engineering classes. The paper uses a lesson on Newton's Laws of Motion applied to a spaceship launch. as an example. The project would include research into spaceships to find the data needed to make calculations. Students, according to this paper's plan, will then explore space related sites after their project is done out of passion for space. The only problem I see with this plan is that Facebook > any space website in the eyes of most college students. So, I think most students will stop doing research on space when their project is done and go back to poking people. But the paper noted that the class seemed interested in the project.
There where also parts of the assignment I liked because it got college students to think on a multigenerational level. Giving students this perspective will increase support for space habitation, which is a long term plan. We need to move people away from their short term focus to make any plan for space a reality. I also like this plan because it meets the space community's need to train it's youngest members very well; the space community's need ensure that every member can argue for space activities effectively.
Reactions
-How can the space community motivate its students?
In Case You Skimmed
-Undergrads can loss interest in space as they go through their engineering classes without doing much space related work, so we need more space related work in classes.
