Tracy Drain

for two years to get a master's in that.

And the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was one of the many NASA centers and companies, aerospace companies that came to the career fair at Georgia Tech interviewing students.

So I bumped into a recruiter and drooled all over them.

All right, all right.

Please hire me.

I would sweep your floors.

Thanks.

And they let me come out to interview at the lab and I got hired right out of grad school.

Yeah, I think it's not quite as cut and dry as that.

So I studied mechanical engineering, which is how you get things to move together in order to accomplish some kind of goal.

Yeah, how do

You can think about it this way.

There are lots of forces that act on any machines.

Like here we are sitting on this chair.

If you're in your car, you're sitting in the car.

And as the wheels are turning, there's a force of friction against the wheels.

And so gravity is just another force that happens to act in the same direction with the same amount of force if you're at sea level everywhere on the earth.

And so from an engineering perspective, it doesn't feel that special per se.

But then when you are designing things in space, you just need to know for your design to subtract that force once it's out there.

But then you have to have a spacecraft that gets through the challenging environment of launch, which has even more Gs than when you get out there.