NASA 01 Intro

The Rhode Island School of Design has an exchange program with NASA’s Habitability and Human Factors Division. When I graduated school in 2005, although I was no longer a student, I had the opportunity to intern at NASA’s Johnson Space Center through this program. My internship only lasted about 3 months, but at the time the Constellation program was just ramping up and the Habitability Design Center needed help building and designing mockups of a new spacecraft. Specifically we were building wood and cardboard mockups of the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), or what would later come to be known as the Constellation Orion capsule. There was tons of work, and I had come at just the right time. My internship turned into working as an independent contractor for a few months, and eventually a full-time contractor with a company called MEI Technologies.

Since I have been at NASA, I have had the privilege to work with some of the greatest engineers and sharpest thinkers in the country. With them, I have been given the opportunity to work on dozens of products, vehicles and habitat concepts. Aerospace design is one of the most challenging and constrained forms of design, centered on balancing the factors of mass, power and volume. While I cannot show all of the work here, I will try to share the process of how we go about conceiving space vehicle and architectural concepts.

Be sure to read Core 77′s article about our team by designer and contributing writer Glen Jackson Taylor. Here
And read the New York Times STYLE article featuring Garrett Finney, Carl Conlee and myself here.