• Question: would you ever join NASA

    Asked by 246spce29 to Aisling, Colin, Laurence, Ned, Niamh on 7 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Aisling Shannon

      Aisling Shannon answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      ESA is the European equivalent of NASA. For people like me who work at ESA, we could get to go to work at NASA for a short time, if the project we were working on was a cooperation with NASA (and some NASA guys could be over here too). But in general NASA only employs Americans (for security reasons mainly) so for Europeans, ESA is your best option.
      Although ESA do not do as many headline grabbing missions as NASA – we do less “manned” spaceflight (astronauts) and more “unmanned” (satellites and other craft – Rovers to explore planets, landers to land on planets/comets), it is still really interesting space exploration work that we do here.

    • Photo: Ned Dwyer

      Ned Dwyer answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      I used to work for ESA as well. I was in their research centre in Rome for three years. It was hugely exciting to be part of the team working on teh first ever European Earth Observing satellite. I got to play with lots of beautiful photos of the Earth. I agree with Aisloing it is a greeat place to work.

    • Photo: Laurence O'Rourke

      Laurence O'Rourke answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      I work for ESA which is the equivalent of NASA. I work a lot in my work with NASA on Rosetta.

    • Photo: Niamh Shaw

      Niamh Shaw answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      Oh yes I would love to – but its very difficult for European people to join NASA as they only usually empty American citizens. But as well as that, we have just as great a Space Agency- The European Space Agency. We have to get our government though to invest more in Human Space Exploration within the European Space Agency and then we have a fighting chance of getting our Irish astronaut.

    • Photo: Colin Shirran

      Colin Shirran answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      I would love to get the experience of working in the US at NASA yeah. It has so much history within the space industry that it would be an experience I couldn’t give up. I would love to work on the next big deep space manned mission whether it’s with NASA, ESA or any other space agency!

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