I just applied to a company that blows stuff up. Dyno Nobel . Industrial explosives. Mining. Blasting. 180 years of it. And they want a product designer. I know how that sounds. Let me explain how I got here. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory was founded by people who got kicked off the Caltech campus for blowing things up. Halloween 1936. Malina, Parsons, and Forman rusted out the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory with toxic nitrogen tetroxide clouds. Their classmates called them the Suicide Squad. Caltech told them to leave. They took their rockets to a dry canyon wash called Arroyo Seco. The Army noticed. That gully became JPL. I will have a graduate degree in Systems Engineering (expected May 2026). My research maps hydrogen on the lunar south pole — specifically outside permanently shadowed craters, a location where NASA has not published findings at the resolution I have been working at, but VIPER's Concept of Operations suggests it matters. I study where the accessible hydrogen is. I think folks at NASA knew. They just never published it? Dyno Nobel's manufacturing chain runs on ammonia made from natural gas. In 2019 they commissioned a feasibility study for a 160MW electrolyser and 210MW solar farm to replace it with green hydrogen (I believe but please correct me if blue, grey, pink etc) The same element I am mapping on the moon. Today I was looking for companies who do more than give lip service to DEI. In September 2025 Dyno Nobel updated their policy. Board-level oversight. Gender identity named explicitly. A dedicated VP. After the rollback wave. I design interfaces for technical operators in high-consequence environments. Dyno Nobel's operators work in exactly those environments. I can do this job. So I applied to blow stuff up.
