There is no reason to study STEM anymore.
There is a good chance your career will be shit and you will be eclipsed by some “I fucking love science” social media attention whore.
‘I’m grateful for Richard Branson’s vision to democratize access to space’: Meet the Florida mom, 32, who has fulfilled her dream of becoming a citizen astronaut for Virgin Galactic – without a science or engineering background
The 32-year-old mother-of-one from Jupiter, Florida, is still in somewhat of a daze after being announced as a research specialist on an upcoming Virgin Galactic flight to conduct various experiments ahead of the company’s commercial flights coming into play.
Gerardi’s space obsession even stretched to her 2015 marriage to private equity specialist Steven Baumruk, where they walked down the aisle to the Imperial March from Star Wars with Storm Troopers in tow.
The wedding invites included a custom-designed mission patch by NASA patch artist Tim Gagnon and American Cosmonaut and Martian Sunrise cocktails were in free flow.
The couple went on to name their daughter Delta Victoria, or Delta-V for short as a ‘deeply geeky’ play to the delta-v symbol which is used in spacecraft flight dynamics.
Luckily, Delta, now aged three, shares her mom’s fascination with all things space she regularly makes appearances on Gerardi’s hugely successful TikTok channel, which has almost half a million fans.
With a background in communications, operations, and business development, Gerardi pursued her dream to work in space by applying these skills within the industry.
During her mission, she will be wearing a smart undershirt, developed by Canadian company Carré Technologies with the support of the Canadian Space Agency, which will be fitted with sensors to detect the biological effects of spaceflight on humans.
Another experiment Gerardi will carry out will look at how liquid behaves in a confined environment in microgravity.
She concludes: ‘Companies like Virgin Galactic are leading the way, not only by enabling a new generation of scientist-astronauts like myself to conduct research in space, but also by creating access opportunities for civilians of all disciplines: like poets, athletes, and musicians.
I actually made parts for Virgin Galactic but the payload specialist is going to be some TikTok influencer, married to a millionaire, because tits on social media are more important than technical knowledge.
This shit ruined the gun industry for me too.
Years of dedication to engineering, design, and testing and yet the industry focused on gun bunnies with hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers who figured out that running an AR while wearing skin tight pants was a great business model.
This shit makes me want to go all Gault.
There is a reason that when they poll kids today on what they want to do for a living YouTube star and influencer is at the top of the list.
Engineering takes real work. Showing your tits online while saying “I love space” gets you to the front of the line as an astronaut.
The endarkenment is coming because the West will be filled with people who want internet fame and few people who know how to keep the internet and electrical infrastructure operational.
Another experiment Gerardi will carry out will look at how liquid behaves in a confined environment in microgravity.
Seriously? How liquids behave in microgravity? Isn’t that part of, oh – I don’t know – every other freaking experiment on the Space Station for 25 years?
At least she looks better than the political hack they sent up on the shuttle mission. Of course that mortherfucker is the NASA Director now. Wall o’ text:
When Congressman Nelson arrived at JSC he was eager to secure a part to play on his mission. NASA obliged him by rolling out the old standby: photography. The congressman, like Garn, would be taking photos of various geologic, meteorologic, and oceanographic phenomena. But Nelson didn’t want to be “Garn-ed.” He wanted to be a contributing crewmember and do something really important. There was just one problem. None of the principal investigators of any of the experiments manifested on the mission wanted Nelson anywhere near their equipment. They were getting one chance to fly their experiments, had been working with the astronauts for months on how to best operate the equipment, and had no desire to have a nontechnical politician step in at the last moment and screw things up. Nelson continued to press the issue, but Hoot Gibson, the mission commander, remained firm…his mission specialists would do the major experiments. The jokers in the office quickly latched on to Nelson’s enthusiasm to operate an “important experiment” and exaggerated it as his “quest to find the cure to cancer.”
With the manifested experiments off limits, Nelson hit on the idea of taking photos of Ethiopia in the hopes they could help humanitarian agencies dealing with the drought that was ravishing the country. This well-meaning intention was exaggerated in office gossip as Nelson’s second mission objective: “To end the famine in Ethiopia.”
Finally, he threw out a real bomb. He wanted NASA to work with the Soviets and arrange an in-orbit gabfest between him and the cosmonauts aboard the Salyut space station. At this moment in history, the Cold War was still very frosty. The complications, both technical and political, to pull off this spacecraft-to-spacecraft link would be difficult and time consuming. The crew wanted nothing to do with it. The MCC flight directors wanted nothing to do with it. To the astonishment of all, even Nelson’s appeals to NASA HQ fell on deaf ears. Nobody wanted to touch this turd. The office gossips had a field day. They created a third Nelson mission objective: “To bring about world peace by talking to the Russian cosmonauts.” The wits got more ammunition when the Salyut cosmonauts unexpected late returned to earth, supposedly because one of them had become ill. Astronauts joked that the commies ended their mission as soon as they heard Nelson wanted to talk to them. Even they didn’t want to be part of that bullshit.
Excerpt From
Riding Rockets
Mike Mullane
Oh, and in reply to this:
“ Years of dedication to engineering, design, and testing and yet the industry focused on gun bunnies with hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers who figured out that running an AR while wearing skin tight pants was a great business model.
This shit makes me want to go all Gault.”
Preach, my friend. Preach!
I fought the same battles. Over decade trying to get to a certain position within my industry only to see people who can fellate senior management get there first while cutting me off at the knees. Then seeing someone hang their “assets” our on YouTube to get free shit while i get to pay full freight.
There are days I look at my BSME degree on the wall and wish it was just an excavator/bulldozer operator certificate.
I have a BA in History and a Associates in Business Management; My husband has a BA in History, a Juris Doctor, and an LLM… We are both pushing our teen daughters to join the skilled trades. Oldest one has her heart set on welding and ironworking (ideally in the merchant marine) and we just found out she’s been accepted to a vocational school instead of a traditional high school.
She starts in fall. Provided she sticks with it, by the times she’s 20, she’ll be making upwards of three- to four-times what I was earning at that age.
The best thing you did for your daughters was to push them to learn a trade.
On the rare occasion I need a professional licensed plumber, I use an independent guy. Has his own one man business. He charges $120 an hour plus parts, and his time starts when he leaves his house (or the previous job). Pick up/delivery of parts is on the clock as well.
I am thinking, $120 per hour is pretty damned good. Granted, he has expenses the average person does not think of, but if he is clearing $60 an hour after expenses, he is netting close to $120K a year take home.
If you are in the trades, you will never starve. Play your cards right, and you can do quite well.
We’re both from the tail end of Generation X; So like most everyone else in our age group, our parents bought into the “if you don’t go to university, you will never make anything of yourself.” So we both went to university… and it was a disaster.
So I’ve been trying the thread the needle of encouraging them to go into a skilled trade, but not making it seem like university was completely out of the question if that’s what they felt like pursuing.
Youngest is only eleven, so no real pressure there yet. Eldest seems pretty set on a trade, but she’s fifteen and can change her mind if she wants… but by going to a vocational alternative high school, she’s going to be a certified welder (or whatever) by graduation. She could opt to go to a four year university and just work weekends at a small fabrication shop and make way more money than her peers working as baristas and pizza guys. So, win-win.
(She’s also kinda interested in enlisting in the Navy… if President Harris hasn’t sold it to China by 2025.)
“she has dedicated her life to space exploration”
By getting a communications/business degree?
Those “wings” she’s wearing are worthless.
The whole launch is a PR stunt. It won’t be orbital, just ballistic. Their time in free-fall will be enough to.demonstrate jiggle physics, so they’re doing a grade-school “liquids in free fall” demonstration.
But Mercury, Apollo, and the Shuttle were PR stunts, too. And there will still be people interested in doing real science and technology.
“And there will still be people interested in doing real science and technology.”
Yes, but … how many of them (whether white male or otherwise) will look at this nonsense, and think to themselves, “I’ve got no chance with this stuff going on,” and decide to do something else with their lives.]
I’ve not much doubt the lady in question really does want to go to space and Do Great Things. I also doubt she sees what she’s doing to people who also want that, but can accomplish something useful and relevant while there.
To my mind engineering (can’t speak directly to the rest of the STEM occupations) started going downhill when people with MBAs, without a technical background, began to be hired as “engineering” managers. No clue what was involved in figuring out what the cause of the problem was, or what work was required to solve it, yet they made schedule commitments their staff couldn’t possibly meet. Of course it was never management’s fault. It got worse when managers were hired for their skin color or lack of “Y” chromosomes instead of competence. Am I bitter, you bet. Am I glad I’m retired, damn right.
Have you been following me through my career? Because it sounds like you’ve been following me through my career.
It took over a decade in industry before I found a great company. All contracting work and the owner of the company is a 30 year PE . . . no BS, just do what it takes to get the job done.
‘I like Star Wars’ is the same type of qualification as our Secretary of Transportation who proposed in an airport.
I bow to your command of analogies.
Glad I’m retired. System engineering was really great at first, but slowly lost its luster.
Still, at least, I didn’t have to deal with some of the stuff described in the other comments.
Most of my colleagues were mathematicians, physicists, electrical engineers, and computer scientists. I was a physicist, but basically we were all engineers.
It’s almost like Idiocracy is a documentary. I only wish that Biden would deliver a state of the union like President Camacho did.
Well, this isn’t exactly NASA, is it? It’s Virgin, and the heart of its business is commercial air travel. Branson is a showman, and a good one at that. That she isn’t an engineer or scientist or even a pilot IS the point, because he wants to make visiting the edge of space feasible and somewhat affordable to people who would never have a chance in Hell to go. From a marketing perspective she’s as good a choice as any.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I’m sure there are plenty of scientists and engineers working hard–with Branson’s money–making sure it goes up and comes down every single time. Hard science people whose best chance of seeing space may be on their employer’s craft, someday, when he’s sending thousands of people every year. What better way to inspire employees (besides stellar pay and benefits) than a chance to go to space?
STEM is no more dead because of this than is computer science because everyone has an easy to use computer in their pockets.
Are you suggesting that NASA is better at engineering and less focused on public spectacle than Virgin is? I’m not sure the evidence would support that.