Interviewing an Engineer: Jessica Pauley

Today, we interviewed Jessica Pauley, an engineer at SpaceX.  What I took away from the interview was that she works very long hours, maybe 60 hours a week, but she does it because she thinks it is important.  I agree; she made an interesting statement that the reason that we can access the internet and listen to music on our phone, in one compact thing, can be related to space exploration and the moon landing because it gave us a desire to have everything on that one compact thing.  I learned that SpaceX has about 9 launches a year, with each piece being fairly inexpensive compared to other companies.  Looking at the website, SpaceX has already had three launches this year: the fifth official mission to resupply the space station, the Dscovr satellite, and two all-electric communications satellites.  Ms. Pauley also said that in order to come back from a failure, the first thing that you should do is admit it.  When asked for one flavor of ice cream to describe her job, Ms. Pauley said pistachio, because you aren't sure that you will like it but it actually turns out pretty good.