Reflection

From the first blog post, I had stated that my academic interest and passion was concerned with aerospace engineering and space exploration specifically. This general topic has been the focus for all of the papers for the rest of the semester. I even made a Mind Map that branched off detailed subtopics from the governing topic of aerospace engineering. From the assigned reading about the idea of waste, I formulated an essay question of whether NASA funding was a waste of money and resources. From this paper, I learned a lot about the type of tasks NASA does outside of space exploration as well as the many views people have dealing with the funding of NASA. Afterwards, I decided to do a research paper over the private space industry. The process for the research paper was very long, but very helpful and informative. Numerous sources had to be retrieve and they had to credible at that. This was done using a little of Google's search engine, but mostly the OSU library databases. From the databases, I found numerous magazine articles, newspaper articles, and papers regarding private space companies. I learned about what many of these private space companies have done and what they are planning to do as well. I, also, learned about the contracts between NASA and a few of the private space companies, ultimately leading me to research more about the collaboration between NASA and the private space industry. Doing summaries of each source forced me to dissect the main ideas of each source giving me a better understanding of the author's viewpoints. This process in its entirety increased my knowledge about the private space industry and helped me formulate my own views on what I believe the role of it should be in regard to space exploration.