The Overview — Pathfinding
Fueling the next generation of aerospace engineers
Pathfinding
Discovering new routes and frontiers, especially through uncharted territory or fields of knowledge.
Welcome back to The Overview! This week’s edition is packed with fascinating stories—all about finding our unique paths in the world:
🚀 Dive into Yuji’s adventures as he shares his experience securing two summer experiences at JPL, where he contributed to the mission design for exploring Saturn and Jupiter—all as a foreign national from Japan!
👥 Follow Mark’s engaging tales in the series “How’d you land that?” where he uncovers the stories behind how people landed their summer internships.
🗞️ Get the latest on the Dragonfly mission to Titan, one of Saturn’s 146 moons! This ambitious project is advancing to full-scale development to study the moon’s potential to support life.
📚 Explore pivotal aerospace insights and histories through our inspiring book recommendations.
🚀 Stories from Aerospace
How can I land an internship at NASA JPL as a foreign national (FN)?
Want to shoot a spacecraft deep into the solar system? Yuji shares how he (as an international student from Japan) interned at JPL and worked on mission designs for the exploration of Saturn and Jupiter.
A few takeaways from his experiences:
References play a critical role (especially for internationals). In fact, he had no official interviews for either internship! In both cases, there were strong recommendations from his network.
Start moving early! Starting your (research) career early helps consolidate trust in your professional caliber, making it easier to knock on the door of places like JPL.
There are usually a few amazing assists before a touchdown. Be sure to be thankful to the people who support you, and to support others by paying it forward.
To learn more, read the full article below:
🗞️ Aerospace News
This week, NASA announced that the Dragonfly mission to Titan (one of Saturn’s 146 moons) has passed its confirmation review and is ready to move into full-scale development. NASA plans to use this dragonfly-looking nuclear-powered rotorcraft to explore Titan and study the moon’s habitability. NASA also confirmed they plan for a July 2028 launch, implying an arrival at Titan in 2034. Read more here, or check out this awesome short video from NASA showing the planned flying/landing sequence.
In other news, scientists at Caltech have used artificial intelligence to create a 3D video showing the gases around the supermassive black hole (Sagittarius A) at the center of the Milky Way. The video is based on 100 minutes of Atacama Large Millimeter Array X-ray data that was observed after an eruption seen in 2017. These techniques offer a novel way to obtain a 3D overview of interesting astronomical structures despite us only observing them from a single viewpoint. Read more here.
👥 Personal Experiences
How’d you land that?!? Part 2
For your viewing pleasure, Mark and friends are returning with some of the most unique, lucky, and downright craziest experiences in the aerospace internship game! Take a peek at today’s article for more tales covering:
Interning with a space-focused VC
Landing an internship with the power of the postal service
A fairytale just-in-time internship search
Maybe you’ll find some moral or useful information in these stories that you can employ in your own job hunt. If not, we hope you find these tales as interesting and entertaining as we did while writing them! So, sit back, relax, and read the full article below:
🔗 Aerospace Book Recommendations
Liftoff by Eric Berger details SpaceX's first six years and its struggle to survive as a company. It is a great introduction to how new space companies function and the crazy work that went into creating the SpaceX of today!
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shettelry tells the story of African American female mathematicians at NASA who played a crucial role in America's space program.
Chasing Space: An Astronaut's Story of Grit, Grace, and Second Chances by Leland Melvin is writen by a former NFL player turned NASA astronaut. This memoir offers a unique journey through overcoming obstacles and achieving dreams, both on Earth and in space.
💬 Quote of the Week
“When the path ignites a soul, there's no remaining in place. The foot touches ground, but not for long.” — Hakim Sanai
Thanks for reading The Overview—The Pathfinding edition. Stay tuned to our newsletter as we bring you the latest aerospace news, advice, and technology.
We'd love to hear your voices—if you have any crazy stories, fun technical content, or cool experiences you'd like to share, apply to write using this form. As always, feel free to reach out at admin@theoverview.org with any feedback or requests for topics you’d like to see in the future.
Stellar vibes,
Yuji, Mark, Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac
Awesome Edition! It's great that people are writing about what they did to get their internships, as that is such valuable work! Cheers to Yuji for guest-authoring!