Things to Come

I'm currently a senior in electrical engineering at the University of Washington. I'm graduating this Spring, and I don't know what's coming next. Now that I've spent four years learning about electronics, there's one thing I know for certain: An undergrad degree in engineering doesn't teach you nearly enough to build your own spacecraft. This is a problem.

I've been interested in spaceflight since I was just a lad. Like most boys, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. The more I learned about spaceflight, the less I wanted to be an astronaut. That's not to say I don't want to go to space, because I do. I just want to wait until it's more convenient and doesn't cause such serious health problems. Not only that, I want to be able to go to space on my own terms. I like the idea of doing research in space, but I'm also attracted to the romance of it. I want to go to space, the Moon, even Mars, for the long term. 

It seems to me that becoming an astronaut isn't the best way to make that a reality. There are a lot of engineering problems that need to be solved before people will be able to do more than just visit space. I'd like to try solving those directly. The first main challenge to human space flight is just getting there. Space isn't really that far away, only about the distance from Seattle to Olympia, but it takes far more effort to safely get there than an afternoon drive. 

In order to safely get to space, we have to have some pretty impressive technology. There are a lot of companies currently working on this problem, and a lot of them are interested in electrical engineers. That said, as a newly graduated engineer, I don't have enough experience to even be considered by some of them. I talked to Blue Origin, and they told me to try back in five years, once I had more experience. After some prodding, it was suggested that I focus on avionics if I really want a job in the field. 

That's where this blog comes in. I don't currently know very much about avionics, but I am going to change that. There are a lot of resources on the subject, and school has done me the favor of teaching me how to learn. The only risk is that I'll get lazy and not study hard enough to become able to solve the hard problems spaceflight faces. By blogging my research and tracking my learning progress, I hope to give myself some added motivation to succeed here.

My large scale goal is to use this blog to make me a better, more knowledgeable engineer who is an expert at avionics. Most of the posts are going to reflect that. I plan to mainly post discussions of various technologies that I need to know about. I also plan to do many personal projects that encapsulate many of the areas I need to know about, and I'll post about those projects here as well. In addition to all of that, I'll also write about spaceflight in general. I'll hopefully average about one post a week here, but I haven't come up with a schedule yet.

At this point, my plans for the immediate future are to write up a survey of the current avionics industry. I'll focus on the many technologies that are commonly used, and come up with a list of things that I need to learn. Expect that post soon.