Here is the full transcript of Lauren Fell’s talk titled “Why Everyone Can Be A Rocket Scientist” at TEDxQUT conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
This seed is a result of generations and generations of adaptation to life on Earth. All it knows is Earth. It’s built for Earth. How can it survive beyond the environment it’s adapted to grow in? Growing up, I never thought I could be part of a space mission. I wasn’t very good at maths in school. In fact, my performance in class led one of my high school maths teachers to tell my parents that Lauren just wouldn’t go very far in life.
The type of environment that typically leads to a career in space is not one I was taught that I was built for. And I believed it. I mean, I wasn’t going to do an engineering degree. I didn’t have my pilot’s license. I didn’t live in Houston, Texas. As silly as some of these imagined qualifications seem now, that’s what we all thought of when I was younger, when we imagined astronauts and the possibilities of working in space.
In 2017, after finishing a degree in psychology and working in user experience research, I received a simple email. It was announcing a challenge that NASA had put out to the public. They wanted help designing a storyboard for a video that would explain how they use RFID tagging on the International Space Station.
A Turn of Events
My first thought was, “Wow, NASA’s letting regular people in on this.” And my second thought was, “What on earth is RFID? Or what off earth is it?” Well, I found out and I put together a submission and, to my immense surprise, I won first place. When the next NASA challenge came around, I jumped in straight away. This was a little different. It was to design a radiation shield that would wrap around a future spacecraft on its way to Mars. And the trick was, it needed to be folded down to be compact enough to fit inside a small rocket.
Again, I thought, “NASA’s really letting people in on this.” I had to think of the solution for this one for a while. But I eventually drew inspiration from how an armadillo folds up its armor, its shield. Now, I didn’t have any industrial design or engineering skills, so I put together my submission the best way I knew how: using the shapes tool in PowerPoint.
I’m fairly sure most of my calculations are incorrect, but despite being someone who didn’t have the CV or education to possibly hope for a job at NASA, they awarded me second place for this design. The freedom of the challenge actually allowed my idea to speak for itself, without needing that formal education or background to prop it up.
Breakthroughs and Innovations
A few years later, after a few more second and third place entries and a whole lot of failed attempts, I had taught myself 3D modeling, 3D printing, and some basic robotics. I used these skills to participate in a higher profile challenge. For this, I designed and built a prototype for a lunar crane that could help autonomously offload cargo from landers of different shapes and sizes on the moon. And for this, I won first place. I’m now coordinating outreach for a consortium that’s designing Australia’s first lunar rover, and I have the great privilege of leading a project that’s putting plants and seeds on the moon in 2026.
Now I won’t use this seed as an analogy for how something as small as a seed can grow into a mighty oak tree. I’ll instead offer a challenge. How would you protect a seed like this on a trip to the moon and ensure that it would grow there, despite not being built for that environment? There are a number of us in the room today, and we’re all likely to have different answers to this question. That’s because we come from different backgrounds. We woke up this morning in different moods. We’ve had different experiences today, priming our ideas. We each have a different perspective on what’s needed to protect something like this.
Diverse Perspectives
I asked three people for their opinions. I asked a gardener, a photographer, and a go-kart racer. “To give it the best chance, you need to add other seeds into the mix. In a natural ecosystem, diversity is essential for life to thrive. Where one seed might not make it, another might have just the right set of properties to let it thrive in an unfamiliar environment, like a different garden or the moon.” The photographer suggested adding in a gyroscope mechanism similar to their anti-shake camera. This would protect the seed from the vibration of launch by constantly adapting to changes in direction.
And the go-kart racer? They suggested protection as well, but they said that you should let the seeds in their container move around freely with the safety of cushioning suspension. So, three people, three unique insights. Diversity of seeds, building adaptability, and the freedom to move in a safe space. Diversity, adaptability, and freedom. Turns out that these three things are important not only to the survival of a seed on its way to the moon but also to humanity’s success in the space industry.
Let’s look at diversity. Space, like any new frontier, throws at us unexpected challenges that require us to think beyond what is considered to be known in any particular field. Expertise and formal education build skills and knowledge in a particular area, and this goes deep and prepares us for specific and expected situations.
The Importance of Diversity, Adaptability, and Freedom
But in learning this way, we’re often taught to focus on where our boundaries are. We learn more about what can’t be done than what can. So, we need to ensure that our experts are always talking to people who are outside of their areas of expertise, to people who might see the possibilities that the experts themselves may have written off.