Introducing DSF: Rising Above the Noise
Many long ages ago, before I was a full time science fiction author (in other words, in 2015), I was a senior scientist at Dynetics in Huntsville, Alabama. As a medium-sized technology company, it mainly does defense contracting, but recently it's been winning quite a few NASA contracts (including one last year that I wrote!) and moving aggressively into the space industry.
Writing proposals for NASA funding is a bit like writing science fiction novels. Not in the sense that you're making stuff up, shooting up large alien spaceships with full phasers and burning through a (metric, not standard) ton of tax dollars, but in the sense that, in both situations, you need to set aside how things are done now, and imagine the possible. You need to get your mind in the future and think, what if?
