Engineering better science education

It doesn’t take a rocket engineer to recognize the widely used and unfortunately misleading technoscience cliché in the subtitle of the worthy September 2021 article “Improving science education: It’s not rocket science—it’s harder! ” (page 26).

In the NASA History Series book Remembering the Space Age, Monique Laney, a historian at Auburn University, declares the term “rocket scientist” a “misnomer used by the media and in popular culture.” ¹ She points to the condemnation of the term by former National Air and Space Museum space history chair Michael Neufeld, who associates it with “a deep-rooted failure in the English-speaking media and popular culture to grapple with the distinction between science and engineering.” Neufeld acknowledges that “the boundaries are fuzzy,” but he asserts that “the correct term is ‘rocket engineer.’” ²

Most who mastermind and shepherd spaceflight to serve science—and maybe commerce—are engineers.