Curiosity was a huge project with many quite separate
parts with people with qualifications of enormous
variety. Thus, Curiosity was not just some one thing.
Also, going "beyond" Curiosity might be an objective
to be considered by a committee reporting to the
head of NASA but is not really a suitable goal
for just one person.
One way to look at Curiosity is that it is just
a platform for a collection of devices for making
scientific measurements. Each such device was
developed by a team, and no doubt the teams were
largely independent. A single device team had experts
in maybe geology, chemistry, optics, mechanical
engineering, electronics. Likely the leading
academic subject matter experts had Ph.D. degrees, but
I have to doubt that usually more than 50%
of a team did.
Once Curiosity was ready to be launched,
there was the rocket, the ground stations that
communicated with the rocket and its payload,
lots of people back at JPL working on
trajectory, guidance, data analysis,
software updates, etc., lots of people with
likely less than 10% of them with a Ph.D.
If you want to make a big splash in, say,
'autonomous vehicles', then
making progress in some part of that field
might be a suitable goal for one person. So,
look at what has been done
at Google, Stanford, CMU, etc. and funded
by DARPA, etc. Also consider aviation
from early autopilots to autonomous
drones and what more that people want.
Consider sea-based autonomous vehicles.
And, of course, the hypersonic scram
jets will have to be autonomous until
they are big enough and trusted enough
to carry a person, which stands to be
a long time.
For sending humans to Mars, my
approach, which you are welcome to borrow
if you want, is first to do a lot
with autonomous vehicles. So, before
even the first human leaves earth,
have dozens of autonomous vehicles
on Mars, awash in redundancy,
with a good camp set up
and running, and able, reliably,
to launch payloads back to earth.
Then, almost as an afterthought,
let a team of humans go,
with appropriate cosmic ray
shielding, etc. So, don't send
any humans until apparently
nearly all the risk is gone.
So, do nearly all the work with
autonomous vehicles first.
Maybe there's some work there
you'd like to do!
But, be careful: Even if autonomous
vehicles are your real interest, you
may find that mostly the qualifications
needed are in mechanical engineering,
aeronautical engineering, control
system engineering, software engineering,
electronic engineering,
etc., and each of
these is a more definite academic field.
That is, even if 'autonomous vehicles'
is a good goal for you, it may
not be a very solid academic
field for you to stand on to
achieve your goal. To know more,
just look at what there is.
On your past academic background, that
might not mean very much. A Ph.D. is
nearly all about just three things,
research, research, and research,
and nearly no one teaching in K-12
has even as much as a weak little hollow
hoot of a tiny clue about research.
Instead, in K-12, have a lot of
babysitting where the teachers, nearly
all women, want good little students,
mostly the girls, to sit still,
be nice, write neatly, be nice,
be quiet, be nice, jump through
little hoops, be nice, etc.
For me? In grades 1-8, all the
teachers in the school agreed --
I was poor student. Apparently
my standardized tests of talent
said otherwise, but that didn't
impress the teachers. So the
teachers treated me like dirt,
and I gave up on trying to please them.
In the eighth grade, my
handwriting just sucked (common
for boys). My 'clerical accuracy'
sucked -- it still does, so to get
something detailed correct I have to
do it one day, wait at least a day,
better a week, and check it. Somehow
that issue doesn't hurt my work
in software; somehow the
mistakes I make are ones a compiler
easily catches; in all the code I've
written over all the decades, I'm
not sure that even once a clerical
accuracy problem became an actual software
bug problem. Since
I have some actual talent in math,
my understanding of the algorithms,
etc. of eighth grade math was
fast without doing the homework.
So, on tests, I didn't do very well:
E.g., I didn't care enough to try
very hard. I didn't even know
why or how to try hard at academics.
So, with my poor handwriting
and poor clerical accuracy,
when I had to, say, multiply
two four digit numbers, in my
intermediate work the columns would
not line up and I would make simple
errors.
So, at the end of the year, my
eighth grade arithmetic teacher
gave me a D and
fervently advised me never to
take another course in math.
My father was actually good in education,
understood that actually I was
learning enough, and laughed at the
arithmetic teacher. Dad was correct.
For the next four years, I was likely
the second best math student in
my grade. It's a good bet that
since then I've been by a good margin
the best math student from the school
ever. The eighth grade arithmetic
teacher knew nothing about math.
Nearly none of my K-12 teachers
knew anything important about
academics. Likely none of them
knew anything about research.
Doing well in K-8 or even K-12
is not a very good predictor of
being good at research. Moreover,
doing poorly in those grades
doesn't mean much, either.
Don't let the K-12 system
evaluate your potential
for research or even academics.
Why? Because for anything significant
in either research or even just academics,
nearly no one in K-12 has even as much
as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny
clue what the heck they are talking about.
For a view of some of the excitement
of research and some of what in
'originality' is crucial, look at the
YouTube lectures of Eric Lander
on microbiology and genetics.
E.g., for a course home page,
Not all academic research is that exciting,
but Lander's emphasis on the excitement
and crucial role of originality is
right on target quite broadly across
STEM fields.
For more, look at the background
and work of, say, Craig Venter.
One little thing he did was
take all the ideas and planning
of the Human Genome project,
trash and junk them, use a
radically different approach,
and totally knock the socks off
all the NIH team. Except for
Venter, the genome project
might be looking to be done
maybe in year 2200! As I recall,
a Venter remark was that the NIH
team was not looking to sequence
the human genome but to set themselves
up with permanent jobs!
If you want to get a Ph.D. in
a STEM field, might take a fast
read of, say,
+1 to all of this. I don't know of any easy solutions to this but I do have some fun long term ideas to add on here. The better you are at networking and seeing and grabbing opportunities, the better your outcome will be. If you can show that you learn very quickly and know what you're doing where it matters (and are clear when you don't), then the lack of a Ph.D. will only limit your choice of employers, not fields. This sounds corny and obvious but you always have to actively keep the thought in your mind.
Look into NASA space center/R&D internships and the like (JPL, Goddard, etc.) if you're interested in aerospace. Also look around for local universities with strong aerospace programs with project based graduate classes. If you're near a top aerospace program (Caltech, MIT, Cal Poly Pomona, Embry-Riddle, etc.) those classes can land you free or even paid work on satellite projects that get launched. As a concrete example: I took Aero105 class at Caltech while still a senior in high school and got to work on aRResT, a Caltech-University of Surrey formation satellite tech demo that should get launched this year or next. If you can get security clearance with NASA then getting in through a university that works with them is relatively easy (sadly the clearance is what got me).
I'm assuming that if you're asking this question, you already have quite a bit of experience in your desired field so I'd like to emphasize universities. You can't just walk into a company and volunteer to work on their projects. Best case scenario you have to apply for an internship because the company can't legally accept free labor, fully trust you when you have nothing invested, etc. Universities, on the other hand, are free game. You'll want to do some due diligence and try to find labs that work extensively with industry (again, Universities with emphases on project based courses are more likely to have such opportunities, i.e. Franklin W. Olin College). Once you find a few labs, try to find some way to contribute to the project without getting in the way of the researchers. Try to find a github library someone in the lab wrote and contribute to it, clean it up, etc. or try to make a hardware project related to what that lab is doing. If you approach the lab with something that shows you understand what they're working on and could actually be a resource instead of a hindrance, the door is wide open. Note there are other, less expensive of getting your foot in the door but this tactic has worked best for me.
I've found a lot non-profits to be similar to corporations. Scared of liability when it comes to engineers volunteering. Unless they go out to developing countries to build stuff like Engineers without Borders, the nonprofits usually only have restrictive lab internships and the like. It's also much harder to get from "foot in the door" to paying salary. Since many professors are largely funded by grants and have tenure, they are for the most part the King in their own little world and can tolerate you hanging around the lab till they can pay you or pass you along to someone that has money for you.
If you're interested in autonomous vehicles in our atmosphere, play around with quadcopters, UAVs, and then try to make your own small, light weight and maneuverable hummingbird robot. Control theory is very approachable if you have some experience with math and computer science. Be forewarned though: I know brilliant people who have spent years at university making control software, it is a deep deep field. On the upper hand, if you manage to write software that can control a small flying robot as well as a hummingbird can fly, you'd win the hypothetical Nobel Prize in Robotics. If there are competitions that don't restrict entrants to universities, join and try to make an impressive show.
You want to have something to show to everyone that screams "I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING" because that's pretty much what everyone thinks a PhD is (ahem: "I was paid less than minimum wage for half a decade or more"). In most of my interactions with academics, I've found that the PhD club is quite like any other tribe, arrogant and full of itself. But don't worry, those doctors are _mostly_ harmless and use the almighty PhD certificate as a defense mechanism and risk management tool. They're rational people who know determination and intellect when they see it.
One way to look at Curiosity is that it is just a platform for a collection of devices for making scientific measurements. Each such device was developed by a team, and no doubt the teams were largely independent. A single device team had experts in maybe geology, chemistry, optics, mechanical engineering, electronics. Likely the leading academic subject matter experts had Ph.D. degrees, but I have to doubt that usually more than 50% of a team did.
Once Curiosity was ready to be launched, there was the rocket, the ground stations that communicated with the rocket and its payload, lots of people back at JPL working on trajectory, guidance, data analysis, software updates, etc., lots of people with likely less than 10% of them with a Ph.D.
If you want to make a big splash in, say, 'autonomous vehicles', then making progress in some part of that field might be a suitable goal for one person. So, look at what has been done at Google, Stanford, CMU, etc. and funded by DARPA, etc. Also consider aviation from early autopilots to autonomous drones and what more that people want. Consider sea-based autonomous vehicles. And, of course, the hypersonic scram jets will have to be autonomous until they are big enough and trusted enough to carry a person, which stands to be a long time.
For sending humans to Mars, my approach, which you are welcome to borrow if you want, is first to do a lot with autonomous vehicles. So, before even the first human leaves earth, have dozens of autonomous vehicles on Mars, awash in redundancy, with a good camp set up and running, and able, reliably, to launch payloads back to earth. Then, almost as an afterthought, let a team of humans go, with appropriate cosmic ray shielding, etc. So, don't send any humans until apparently nearly all the risk is gone. So, do nearly all the work with autonomous vehicles first. Maybe there's some work there you'd like to do!
But, be careful: Even if autonomous vehicles are your real interest, you may find that mostly the qualifications needed are in mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, control system engineering, software engineering, electronic engineering, etc., and each of these is a more definite academic field. That is, even if 'autonomous vehicles' is a good goal for you, it may not be a very solid academic field for you to stand on to achieve your goal. To know more, just look at what there is.
On your past academic background, that might not mean very much. A Ph.D. is nearly all about just three things, research, research, and research, and nearly no one teaching in K-12 has even as much as a weak little hollow hoot of a tiny clue about research. Instead, in K-12, have a lot of babysitting where the teachers, nearly all women, want good little students, mostly the girls, to sit still, be nice, write neatly, be nice, be quiet, be nice, jump through little hoops, be nice, etc.
For me? In grades 1-8, all the teachers in the school agreed -- I was poor student. Apparently my standardized tests of talent said otherwise, but that didn't impress the teachers. So the teachers treated me like dirt, and I gave up on trying to please them. In the eighth grade, my handwriting just sucked (common for boys). My 'clerical accuracy' sucked -- it still does, so to get something detailed correct I have to do it one day, wait at least a day, better a week, and check it. Somehow that issue doesn't hurt my work in software; somehow the mistakes I make are ones a compiler easily catches; in all the code I've written over all the decades, I'm not sure that even once a clerical accuracy problem became an actual software bug problem. Since I have some actual talent in math, my understanding of the algorithms, etc. of eighth grade math was fast without doing the homework.
So, on tests, I didn't do very well: E.g., I didn't care enough to try very hard. I didn't even know why or how to try hard at academics. So, with my poor handwriting and poor clerical accuracy, when I had to, say, multiply two four digit numbers, in my intermediate work the columns would not line up and I would make simple errors.
So, at the end of the year, my eighth grade arithmetic teacher gave me a D and fervently advised me never to take another course in math.
My father was actually good in education, understood that actually I was learning enough, and laughed at the arithmetic teacher. Dad was correct. For the next four years, I was likely the second best math student in my grade. It's a good bet that since then I've been by a good margin the best math student from the school ever. The eighth grade arithmetic teacher knew nothing about math. Nearly none of my K-12 teachers knew anything important about academics. Likely none of them knew anything about research.
Doing well in K-8 or even K-12 is not a very good predictor of being good at research. Moreover, doing poorly in those grades doesn't mean much, either.
Don't let the K-12 system evaluate your potential for research or even academics. Why? Because for anything significant in either research or even just academics, nearly no one in K-12 has even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue what the heck they are talking about.
For a view of some of the excitement of research and some of what in 'originality' is crucial, look at the YouTube lectures of Eric Lander on microbiology and genetics. E.g., for a course home page,
Can download course text materials at A TOC of the videos for the course are at See also Lander's Not all academic research is that exciting, but Lander's emphasis on the excitement and crucial role of originality is right on target quite broadly across STEM fields.For more, look at the background and work of, say, Craig Venter. One little thing he did was take all the ideas and planning of the Human Genome project, trash and junk them, use a radically different approach, and totally knock the socks off all the NIH team. Except for Venter, the genome project might be looking to be done maybe in year 2200! As I recall, a Venter remark was that the NIH team was not looking to sequence the human genome but to set themselves up with permanent jobs!
If you want to get a Ph.D. in a STEM field, might take a fast read of, say,