USC engineering student Maddie Koldos interned at Blue Origin this summer as a Brooke Owens Fellow. (Brooke Owens Fellowship Photo)
The online application window has just opened for the Brooke Owens Fellowship program, which offers paid internships for undergraduate women at 30 aerospace concerns, including Amazon Prime Air, Blue Origin and Stratolaunch in the Seattle area. Other host institutions range from NASA and SpaceX to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. This will be the third year for the “Brookies,” honoring the memory of Brooke Owens, who worked at NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration and died of cancer in 2016.
A year ago, the College Board saw the numbers of female students and underrepresented minority students taking the Advanced Placement exam for computer science more than double — but what about this year?
As Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi puts it, “the momentum continues.”
The statistics don’t quite match last year’s triple-digit percentage increases. But they do show a narrower gap between female students as well as black and Latino students on one side, and male students as well as white and Asian students on the other.
Students from colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada are being recruited for the Base 11 Space Challenge, a $1 million competition to encourage the development of a liquid-fueled, single-stage rocket powerful enough to reach 100 kilometers (62 miles) in altitude. That height marks the internationally accepted boundary of space. Deadline for winning the $1 million grand prize is Dec. 30, 2021, and there’ll be smaller incentive prizes awarded along the way.
The Boeing Co., which has its corporate headquarters in Chicago, says it’s devoting $100 million to workforce development programs. (Boeing Photo)
Boeing is launching new educational initiatives to follow through on its pledge to spend $100 million of its federal tax savings on workforce development programs.
The initiatives include a partnership with Degreed.com to give employees access to online lessons, certification courses and degree programs.
Another initiative will put $6 million into a partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and several historically black colleges and universities. That investment will support scholarships, internships and boot-camp programs to help students experience what it’s like to work at Boeing, the company said.
There’ll also be several new programs to help Boeing employees enhance their technical skills and keep up with industry trends. The focus of the first program will be digital literacy, Boeing said.
A doll named Luciana Vega is unveiled as the American Girl of the Year for 2018 on ABC’s “Good Morning America” as Space Camp girls look on. (ABC / GMA)
American Girl put a Space Age spin on the centuries-old tradition of dress-up dolls today by unveiling a spacesuit-clad character named Luciana Vega as its “Girl of the Year” for 2018.
The big reveal came on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” when the 18-inch-high doll was lowered to the set amid a throng of girls wearing Space Camp uniforms. Each of them got a doll.
American Girl, which has been putting out dolls and accessories with elaborate stories behind them since 1986, says Vega’s character is an 11-year-old “aspiring astronaut who dreams of being the first person to go to Mars.”
Aaron Quach and Jonathan Thiem, students at Mountlake Terrace High School, work on a Boeing-backed class project that involves designing an efficient airplane wing. (Boeing Photo / Katie Lomax)
The state of the aerospace industry in Washington state is still great, but industry leaders say the educational system will have to be beefed up if it’s going to stay that way for the next generation.
eff Bezos gets his picture taken with students at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
By Chelsey Ballarte and Alan Boyle
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos visited the Museum of Flight this weekend to answer questions from students, the kids did not hold back.
“That’s one of the great things about kids,” Bezos said on May 20. “There are always questions.”
Scores of elementary-school and middle-school students came from the Seattle area as well as from Deer Park, a city just north of Spokane on the other side of the state, to cram into the museum’s “Apollo” exhibit and meet America’s second-richest person (after Bill Gates).
Jeff Bezos takes questions from kids at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire Photo / Chelsey Ballarte)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to Seattle’s Museum of Flight today to talk with students about the decades-old rocket engines he rescued from the sea – but he stayed to share some down-to-earth lessons for life on this planet.
“Be proud, not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices,” the billionaire told more than 100 kids and grown-ups who crammed themselves into the central gallery for “Apollo,” the museum’s new exhibit focusing on the 1960s space race.
The highlight of the show is a display of components from the mighty F-1 engines that powered Apollo astronauts on the first leg of their journey to the moon. Bezos backed a multimillion-dollar effort to recover the Saturn V engines from the bottom of the Atlantic.
Today, he stood between those artifacts and an intact F-1 engine, which was lent to the museum by NASA, as he answered questions from elementary-school and middle-school students.
A fellowship program for women in aerospace pays tribute to space industry pioneer Brooke Owens, shown here during a zero-G airplane flight. (Photo courtesy of the Brooke Owens Fellowship Program)
Thirty-six women with a passion for aerospace have been selected to receive the first batch of Brooke Owens Fellowships – paid summer internships at a wide range of institutions across the country.
One of the women, Chelsey Ballarte, will be spending the summer with us at GeekWire.
Others will be joining her in the Seattle area at organizations such as Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, Vulcan Aerospace and the Museum of Flight.
“These women have the potential not only to contribute to the aerospace industry but to lead it,” Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator who is now general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association, said in today’s announcement of the fellowships.
Brooke Owens, a pilot and space policy expert, died of cancer in June at the age of 35. She was an alumna of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. (Credit: Brooke Owens Fellowship Program)
Space industry pioneer Brooke Owens didn’t live long enough to reach the final frontier, but her life has inspired a fellowship program that will help other women follow in her footsteps.
This week marks the kickoff of the Brooke Owens Fellowship Program, which will offer paid summer internships for undergraduate women interested in aerospace careers.
GeekWire is among the first organizations to participate, taking our place alongside such space stalwarts as Arianespace, Blue Origin, the Museum of Flight, Planetary Resources, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.
We’re the only host institution in the pack to offer an internship on the journalistic side of the aerospace frontier – and we’re looking for someone great to work with us in Seattle.
