Joe Raedle / Staff
We’ve seen 21 tough interview job questions that you might get asked if you were applying to work at Amazon. Now we get insight on some of the complicated science questions at a SpaceX job interview. If you want to work for Elon Musk at his impressive aerospace transport company you will have to answer some complex job questions.
If you’re interested in working as an intern at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, you should know that it is extremely demanding. You will need to not only be intelligent but also be willing to work up to 80 hours a week.
SpaceX hires more than 700 interns a year, pays them handsomely at $22 an hour, and was named as one of the top 50 best places to work in 2018. Plus you might get to help design a rocket that goes to Mars.
Business Insider scoured over 1,000 reviews of SpaceX on recruiting website Glassdoor.
They mined 16 difficult SpaceX job interview questions that potential interns must answer if they want a job at the space exploration company that is marching towards the possibility of colonizing Mars. To get hired by SpaceX you’ll have to pass two in-depth phone interviews and answer some of these complicated STEM questions.
“What are composites?”
“What is the size of an integer on a 32-bit system?”
“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’?”
“What is a null pointer?”
“If you have a large, heavy object moving very, very fast, how do you safely slow it down?’
“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?”
“How would you attach a sensitive instrument to a shaking surface?”
“There are all kinds of data structures out there, like arrays and heaps. Why can’t there just be one that does it all?”
“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?”
“What happens when you run a high current (spot welding) through a nickel piece touching a copper piece?”
“Describe the design process of a series of pipes to be used in a rapid fueling system for a liquid propellant rocket engine. Be sure to include which equations would be best for the case at hand for fluid pressure calculations and structural considerations.”
“How do you regulate the temperature of something in space? What is your main limiting factor?”
These are a lot more difficult than the typical job interview questions such as “Where do you see yourself five years from now?” You can check out all 16 SpaceX job interview questions over at Business Insider.
If you love what SpaceX is doing, but don’t think you’re qualified to get a job there, then enjoy wathcing Elon Musk react to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket launch by freaking out and dropping an F-bomb.