NASA Internships: From High School Gyms to Mars

Ask a room full of 10-year-olds what they want to be when they grow up, and you’ll hear “Astronaut” or “NASA Engineer” more than anything else. But as they get older, that dream fades. People start to believe that the path to NASA is reserved for Sheldon Cooper-type geniuses, or people who go to Ivy League schools and have 3 PhDs.

In reality, the path to NASA is much more direct suitable for normal people, and it goes straight through a high school gymnasium on a Saturday afternoon.

The Connection: FIRST Robotics

NASA is the largest sponsor of FIRST Robotics. They don’t just throw money at it for charity. They provide mentors, machine shops, and grants. Why? Recruitment.

NASA engineers know that building a robot for the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) or FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) requires the exact same skill set as building a rover for Mars.

1. Telepresence (Remote Operation)

When you drive a robot in FTC, you are often looking through a camera feed, or driving “Blind” from the other side of the field. You have to understand latency, control lag, and spatial awareness. This is exactly how NASA drives Curiosity and Perseverance on Mars. The only difference is the lag is 20 minutes instead of 20 milliseconds.

2. Redundancy and Reliability

In space, you can’t send a repair crew. If a wire comes loose, the mission is over. In robotics competitions, you have 2 minutes to score. If a wire comes loose, you lose the match. Robotics teaches students to build Fail-Safe systems. You learn to use strain relief on cables, to use locking nuts, and to design mechanisms that can still work even if one motor fails. This mindset of “Failure is not an option” is the core of NASA engineering.

3. Sensor Fusion

Robots on Mars don’t have GPS (there are no satellites around Mars). They have to figure out where they are using Odometry (counting wheel rotations) and Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). FTC robots do the exact same thing. We use “Odometry Pods” and cameras to track our position on the field to within a millimeter. A high school student writing a localization algorithm is literally writing the same logic code as a JPL engineer.

The Stats Don’t Lie

The overlap is staggering. If you walk into mission control at SpaceX, Blue Origin, or NASA JPL, you will find FIRST Alumni stickers on laptops everywhere.

• Preferred Internships: High school students who participate in FIRST are eligible for specific NASA internships that generally aren’t open to the public. They know these students already know CAD (Onshape/Solidworks) and Python.
• The “Dean’s List”: Students who win this prestigious individual robotics award are virtually guaranteed looks from top recruiters.

Case Study: The Mars Helicopter

Think about Ingenuity, the little helicopter on Mars.

• It had to fit in a tiny box (Size constraints).
• It had to unfold automatically (Linkages and Servos).
• It had to fly autonomously because radio signals are too slow (Autonomous coding).
• It had to use lightweight materials (Carbon Fiber).

These are literally the phases of an FTC match: Inspection (Size), Autonomous Period (No driver input), Endgame (Deployment mechanisms). The engineers who built Ingenuity didn’t just learn that in a textbook; many of them learned it by building competitive robots as teenagers.

Start Your Mission Now

You don’t have to wait until you have a PhD to be a rocket scientist. By joining a robotics team now, you are learning the industry standard CAD, the coding languages, and the manufacturing techniques used at NASA today. The road to Mars is long, but the on-ramp is probably in your local high school.