Studying

Nothing exciting to report today unless you count doing laundry as exciting. It was for me because we have so little free time. I was happy to finally get it done! J The lectures continue to get more technical. Today we learned about the sun and heliosphere, space propulsion, and the space environment. We spent the afternoon with our departments. In business and management we had two more lectures; "strategic planning" and "sales and selling". Then we were given a role of either a buyer or a seller for a satellite or launch company, respectively. We paired up and had to negotiate an agreement and price. My partner, Eric, and I came to a win/win solution and were very pleased with our agreement even after comparing the information we were each given.

After the lectures and workshop I met with my business and management project team to work out some of the details and assignments for our project, which is to respond to a request for proposal. To briefly summarize the request, there is a company with a new launch vehicle that has room for a satellite payload which will go into a sun-synchronous orbit (for those of you who understand what that means). It must be a weather satellite with commercial applications. Today we came up with an idea of what type of service the satellite would provide to industry and assigned sections of the proposal to each individual. There are 4 people in the group. Eric from Canada, Alexander from the Netherlands, Jizhong from China, and myself. Jizhong is working on his English, but it is a challenge to talk about something so technical without a translator. We are all doing our best to make sure that we talk slow enough and that he understands and has an opportunity to contribute.