SpaceX is hiring a farmer. Making up outrageous reasons why a bleeding-edge spaceship manufacturer requires a farmer is far more interesting than the prosaic, “Our testing facility is surrounded by a farm that needs maintenance.” Join me in unfounded speculation!
The company’s rocket development and testing facility in McGregor, Texas, is surrounded by farmland also owned by the company. This gives them a protective buffer for when test flights don’t go exactly as planned, and makes it entirely reasonable that they’d need a farmer. But that’s a dull, reasonable explanation. Surely we can come up with something more inspired! To get things started, here’s an incomplete list of alternate explanations:
The dehydrated, irradiated, thermostabilized Thanksgiving dinner on the International Space Station was too depressing for words, so SpaceX will be including space-gardens on all crew transport vehicles, starting with Dragon 2.
SpaceX is getting really tired of disapproving side-eye from cows.
Hopeless discouraged by a single failed test flight in dozens of successful launches, SpaceX is giving up on spaceflight and taking up industrial agriculture.
The next-generation Falcon rocket will go green, using corn as rocket fuel.
SpaceX is hiring bait for their alien-capture program since it’s well-known that alien abductions disproportionately target farmers.
Inspired by Wanderers, SpaceX is launching an astro-agriculture position to develop techniques to terraform asteroid colonies and moon domes.
What are your ideas?
Top image: SpaceX’s rocket development and testing facility in McGregor, Texas, is surrounded by parcels of farmland, the most likely reason the spacecraft manufacturer needs a farmer. Image credit: Steve Jurvetson
Interested in bringing agriculture to the SpaceX team? You can apply for the job here.
