Mars Ascent Vehicle; Why Do People Work in Defense? 8 views

There is a lot of focus on landing on Mars, but what about getting off Mars? In their Moon to Mars Architecture, NASA has identified the design of a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) as a major technology gap for future crewed missions to Mars. My capstone project addresses this gap by creating a MAV design. Our scope involved developing a computer aided design model of the MAV, designing an orbital trajectory for the MAV, and creating a 3D printed subscale prototype of the MAV. We constrained ourselves to fit the MAV within the 7 m payload fairing of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket prompting us to optimize the MAV’s structure to fit within this payload fairing while supporting a four person crew. For the STS component of my thesis, I researched the question “why do people work in defense?” By answering this question, we can learn how genuine, well-meaning people are coerced into working for defense companies despite not wanting to. After understanding societal forces impacting that decision and the agency of the individual, we can understand how one can make decisions to not contribute to creating evil and how we can bring about societal changes to make this easier. I focused my data collection on analyzing job postings. Job postings are the first step to entering industry, and analyzing how companies market themselves and the work they do on these job postings can offer insight into the tactics used to recruit a broad audience to defense work. From this data, I found two main categories of the tactics used to recruit people into the defense industry, answering my question of why do people work in defense: playing into the “cool factor” of defense work and being banal in the job postings.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Defense; Employment; Banality of evil; Mars; Space exploration

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering Technical Advisor: Christopher Goyne, Michael McPherson STS Advisor: Karina Ripley Technical Team Members: Amen Alemu, David Truong, Mariam Leweed, Anne Marie Branch, Nayeon Son, Matthew Herring

2026-05-08