Want to get a job in space? You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Here are five amazing space jobs you might not have known about.
Planetary defender
Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Your mission? Stop it from happening to us. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office develops telescopes to look for incoming space rocks. And they test asteroid deflection technologies in space, on real asteroids!
Astrometallurgist
It takes a lot of rockets to get stuff into space. It would be much cheaper if we could just make stuff out of asteroids and moon rocks instead.
Astrometallurgists like CSIRO’s Dr Matt Shaw find ways to turn space rocks into useful metals. It’s part chemistry, part engineering, part materials science, and wholly out of this world!
Space archaeologist
Archaeologists dig up lost cities and ruined pyramids, and anywhere else that humans have lived. And since humans have started living in space, there’s been archaeology there, too.
Australia’s Alice Gorman leads the International Space Station Archaeological Project, where she keeps track of how astronauts really live in space. She’s only got a limited time – the International Space Station will be destroyed when it closes.
Space psychologist
Being an astronaut is really hard. Work days are long and tiring, and there are only a few millimetres of metal keeping you safe from the vacuum of space.
Space psychologists keep astronauts mentally healthy so they can keep working in space. After all, no one wants to repeat the ‘mutiny’ on Skylab 4! The worn-out astronauts went on strike for a day, turning off all communication to Mission Control.
Chief sniffer
Imagine you’re locked in a spaceship for a whole year. And it smells really, really bad. Luckily, that’s not a problem. That’s because George Aldrich is NASA’s chief sniffer.
George smells everything that goes to space, from soap to sandwiches to screwdrivers. And anything that stinks, doesn’t go to space!
Elective checklist
Houston, you won’t have a problem landing a science + space job if you take high school:
- Physics
- Maths (advanced)
- Geology
- Biology
- Design & Technology
- Earth & Environmental Science
