Progress continues at Advanced Space, as I’ve now been working there a month and a half. As my employer starts to observe my capabilities and the number of tasks that require writing or editing, I find my list of tasks expanding. That’s as I would prefer it.

In an operational sense, I’m at a medium-sized organization, in that I am not the only writer on the team. There’s also a graphic designer in the group, which I greatly appreciate.

From a content perspective, I’m still at a small company (around 55 people) given that I am called upon to work on multiple types of products and contents. To date, my work has varied between social media and blog posts, internal process documents, customer presentations, and a recommendation letter or two for an intern applying for an engineering award. I got rumblings late last week that I might be contributing to proposals or white papers or both. Yay!

I think I mentioned before that these folks are wicked smart. After 17 years dealing mostly with propulsion (i.e., rockets), I’m now working for folks who develop guidance algorithms–the computer programs that tell spacecraft what course or orbit to follow. I don’t speak astrodynamics well, so I’m having to do a bit of reading to at least get less ignorant on the terminology they use. They also deal with artificial intelligence (AI), teaching computers how to solve problems like orbits on their own.

As usual, I have a lot to learn, but I also have my secret weapon for approaching technical subjects: figure out where the subjects, verbs, and objects are, and then reorder the words so the text reads more clearly. It’s probably appalling to the engineers that I can fix their writing without actually understanding what they’re doing, but we all have our mysterious gifts, don’t we?

This coming month, I’ll be visiting the office in Colorado, meeting people face to face. I’ll discuss the value of that in next month’s entry. For now, just know that my adjustment back to corporate life hasn’t been too arduous. I do miss my afternoon naps, though.

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