Here's What You'd Get Asked If You Wanted To Intern At SpaceX

The questions you get asked in a standard interview include the likes of 'So where do you see yourself in a few years?', and 'Who would you least like to be stuck in a lift with?'

That isn't the sort of grilling you can expect at Elon Musk's SpaceX, the California-based aerospace company which has the ultimate aim of allowing humans to live on Mars. Small ambitions then.

Designing, building and launching rockets that can send cars drifting towards the asteroid belt, as SpaceX did last week, is a cool job for anyone. It's no surprise, then, that SpaceX was recently voted one of the best places to work according to users of the recruiting website Glassdoor.

Over 700 people are lucky enough to be employed as interns at SpaceX each year - but the problem is you have to answer a set of insanely hard questions to land the job.

HOW REALISTIC IS ELON MUSK'S PLAN TO COLONISE MARS?

According to Business Insider, SpaceX interns are expected to work a grueling 80 hours per week, helping the company to launch its wild space missions - no thinking you can get away with a half-assed job and making coffee there.

The upside of this is that SpaceX interns are paid handsomely, earning about $22 (£15.91) an hour. They can find themselves employed in a range of departments including avionics, dynamics, launch operations, manufacturing, and enterprise information systems.

Given how serious all that sounds - and the fact that there are dire consequences if a rocket launch goes wrong - SpaceX obviously wants to make sure it's hiring the right people.

That's why SpaceX's hiring process is so rigorous, consisting of two in-depth phone interviews where candidates are expected to answer questions on physics and quantum mechanics most STEM graduates would probably struggle to answer.

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According to information from Glassdoor, some of the questions they will ask you include:

1. "What are composites?"

2. "One side of a beam is attached to a wall and the other is free. If a force is applied, where would it break, and what would you need to know to determine the force that would break the beam?"

3. "There are all kinds of data structures out there, like arrays and heaps. Why can't there just be one that does it all?"

4. "Imagine a cantilever beam fixed at one end with a mass = m and a length = L. If this beam is subject to an inertial force and a uniformly distributed load = w, what is the moment present at a length of L/4?"

5. "How do you regulate the temperature of something in space? What is your main limiting factor?"

6. "Let's say you have a variable 'var' assigned to be '2'. What will display if you print 'var++'? If you print '++var' on the next line, what will be displayed? What is the final value of 'var'?'"

Uhh....

via GIPHY

If you're internally asking at this point: 'Why can't they just ask me what my biggest weakness is?!?!' don't worry - we're right there with you.

Thankfully, not all of the questions are so torturous: one slightly easier question SpaceX asks its applicants is 'What makes you different from every other engineer that applies to SpaceX?'

And the answer to that is: 'I'm not smart enough to be able to answer any of these questions'. Probably.

Topics: SpaceX, Technology, Community

Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from the University of East Anglia with degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing before completing his NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism. Chris has previously written for the independent culture magazine The Skinny, among other publications.

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