Question: Aisling apart from an engineer or a jewlery designer/maker what would be your ideal job?

Aisling Shannon answered on 2 Mar 2016:

Hi Emma, if you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said something that involved travelling all over the world, somehow getting paid to explore!! But now, as I have a couple of kids, I wouldn’t want to be away from them, so my priorities have changed. I think if I was to change job, I would probably stay within ESA as there are lots of opportunities for things other than engineering too… We have a communications group who are responsible for all the public relations and TV stuff, we have a technology transfer group which is really interesting – they look at technologies we use for space and see if they would be useful for Earth (like the solar panels you can have on your roof) or the technologies on earth that we could use in space.