Twitter and What I Found There

Jones, Mark. "Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor USAF Photo" 4/27/01 via Flickr. CC Common Attribution Generic

While Aerospace Engineering is a highly professional career, even engineers can resort to Twitter to geek out over the latest products or relate to fellow enthusiasts. Following two Twitter feeds, AerospaceEngineering and DARE, I found the answer to three main questions about blogs in this industry, their stories, what stories stand out, and how they reflect on Aerospace as a whole. What is your opinion on Aerospace Engineering from these two blogs? Let me know below.

What kinds of things do people on Twitter seem to be talking about, debating, arguing about or otherwise engaging in meaningful exhanges of ideas about? Give us a descriptive and clear sense of the kinds of stories you're seeing in these Twitter feeds.

 The AerospaceEngineering blogs seems to follow the latest and greatest in the Aerospace industry, such as new advancements, concept projects, or current events in the industry, such as fuel efficiency changes or new plane flights. Dare mostly follow a certain category of rocketry enthusiasts, who also support Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering, a student organization for rocket engineering,which leads to many posts about their progress or other student projects in rocketry globally.

In your opinion, what are the two most interesting conversations or stories you found in the Twitter feeds? Hyperlink us to the two different Twitter feeds and explain why you found those conversations nteresting. Be specific and honest and be yourself. I don't want you to blah-blah-blah this. I want you to really engage.

 Within these two feeds I found two very interesting conversations to me. One within the DARE feed followed an interaction between Kerbal Space Program, a rocket and plane game found on Steam that allowed the player to build rockets or plane to complete missions and explore planets and moons, a game I recently acquired and have found myself playing for hours. This link between games and my industry is catchy as a company building their own rockets on this game makes me realize the closing gap between business simulations and games in today's digital world. The other interaction involved a NASA test I thought would have to wait years to occur. NASA testing a plane wing with many small electric engines to test electric feasibility for flight, but I thought this would be many years off, as battery technology still has a long way to go to make the jump between just being introduced in cars, such as the Tesla, to jumbo jets requiring thousands of pounds of jet fuel to take off.

Overall, what impression do you get of your discipline based on what you saw happening on Twitter? Were the people in these feeds talking in ways you expected or did not expect, about things you anticipated they'd be talking about or things you had no idea they'd be discussing? Explain in concise specific detail.

I feel like my discipline is overall immensely passionate about their specific subjects. DARE's feed led me to think that people who worked on rockets were genuinely passionate about rocketry around the globe and sought to advance their work, a far cry from some people I have heard in person only wanting to do engineering for the money, or because they are good at math. I thought some people would have passion, but with the internet and its content at an engineer's disposal, it can be easily seen that many Aerospace Engineer's are excited about their field.