Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, George Gorospe was taught by his parents to take pride in his Native American heritage. His father was a journalist and political activist, who was one of the founding members of the Native American Journalist Association. When it was time to attend high school, his parents sent him to the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Santa Fe Indian School, operated by the All Indian Pueblo Council, seeks to empower Native American youth with Native American culture as a foundation.
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After high school graduation, George attended Dartmouth College, where he was the president of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. He majored in Classical Studies (history of Greece and Rome) and graduated in 2006. With a college degree in hand, he returned to his community and to SFIS where he became a high school teacher and gave back to his community through after school programs and tutoring. In 2009, he left the school and started another degree program at the University of New Mexico (UNM), School of Engineering. There, he was president of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, the Japanese Language Learning Club, and he founded the UNM Robotics Club.
While attending college, he interned at NASA Ames three times. Between 2010 and 2012, he interned under the Tribal Colleges and Universities Program, the NASA Robotics Academy and the NASA Academy for Space Exploration. During his first internship, he rebuilt and developed new software for a 100-kilogram planetary rover. Before leaving Ames, he was able to integrate his smartphone as a remote controller for the robot. During his second internship in 2011, he participated in the NASA Robotics Academy, where he performed vibrational stress analyses for the group project, called the Lunar Micro Rover, in the Ames-supported FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics laboratory.
Just after his UNM graduation in 2012, he participated in the NASA Academy for Space Exploration. This is one of NASA’s premier leadership development programs. During this internship experience, he traveled across the country to different NASA centers, where he met project managers and directors. He even traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet politicians and learn about space policy and the economics of a space program.
Today, he works as a professional research engineer at Ames. He started his NASA career in the Mission Design Center, working on conceptual missions to send robotic explorers to the outer solar system and to the south pole of the moon. Later, he transitioned to the Intelligent Systems Division and the Systems Health, Analytics, Resilience, and Physics modeling (SHARP) laboratory as a research engineer and developer of prototype test systems. In 2016, he became the manager of the SHARP lab, the very same laboratory where he interned in 2010.
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Image Credit: courtesy of George Gorospe