It’s inspiration Friday, what are you doing to advance science and technology?

Around here, we like to talk on Fridays about interesting people who are doing awesome things. Alex is still building spaceships, communications, and other crazy stuff in his garage.

We’re going to venture into the world of spacecraft technicians today.

Spacecraft are complicated machines that require the best engineers in each field to perform work to standards with insanely small margins of error.

If you’re a Shuttle Technician, you can find yourself in a lot of interesting and challenging situations.  It would be easy to just follow procedures, making sure your assemblies and fixes are technically correct without picking your head up to look around.

Jen Scheer isn’t your ordinary Shuttle Tech.

Jen is an inventor.  A person with ideas about a lot of things.  Technical ideas, social ideas, ideas about outreach.  It’s a long list.

Jen is different.  She doesn’t sit on her ideas waiting for someday to turn into never.  She picks out the best ones and acts on them.

Difficult problems require strong leadership.  Leaders act on their ideas.

Many of us have ideas. Having ideas is the easy part.  Implementing your ideas is often very, very hard.

Jen has submitted 10 inventions to NASA.

10 INVENTIONS !

Not just thought of.  Worked on to the point of formal submission.

In your job or passion, are you looking at things so carefully that you’ve come up with 10 totally new things?  If she’s submitted 10, that means she’s probably got 100 others swimming around in her head.

Jen has her radar for ideas on all the time.  She’s a collector and distributor of ideas.

When you’re an idea woman, you tend to attract other idea makers.  The results can be pretty sweet.

Jen was on our Podcast #11 to talk about something completely new and different.   A while back, Jen met @absolutspacegrl on twitter.  A relationship bloomed and they met in person.  Ideas turned into actions and they settled on forming an outreach group: The Space Tweep Society

The Space Tweep Society is a loose group of people who have a passion for reaching out to people in promotion of Space Exploration.  The “Space Tweeps” are a Montly Crue of people just like Jen.  Some intense, some weird, but all interesting and wonderful.  As a group they pursue their passion for Space Exploration with vigor.  They learn and grow together as they search for ways to get the word out and come up with new ideas.

For Jen, the formation of the Space Tweep Society and submitting inventions to NASA is just the beginning.

With the future of NASA uncertain, we turn to people like Jen for ideas that don’t fit the mold.

Right now, the American Space program needs ideas.

BAD.
Jen Scheer is helping humanity explore off of the Earth one idea at a time.

Follow Jen on Twitter at @flyingjenny

What are YOU doing today?