This seed is a result of generations and generations of adaptation（适应） to life on Earth. All it knows is Earth. It's built for Earth. How can it survive beyond（在…的那边） the environment it's adapted（使适应） to grow in? Growing up, I never thought I could be part of a space mission（使命）. I wasn't very good at maths in school.

  In fact, my performance in class led one of my high school maths teachers to tell my parents that Lauren just wouldn't go very far in life. The type of environment that typically leads to a career in space is not one I was taught that I was built for. And I believed it. I mean, I wasn't going to do an engineering degree. I didn't have my pilot's license. I didn't live in Houston, Texas（德克萨斯州（美国州名））.

  As silly as some of these imagined qualifications seem now, that's what we all thought of when I was younger, when we imagined astronauts and the possibilities of working in space. In 2017, after finishing a degree in psychology（ 心理学） and working in user experience research, I received a simple email. It was announcing a challenge that NASA had put out to the public. They wanted help designing a storyboard for a video that would explain how they use RFID tagging on the International Space Station. My first thought was, wow, NASA is letting regular people in on this? And my second thought was, what on earth is RFID?

  Or what off earth is it? Well, I found（找到） out and I put together a submission（屈服）. And to my immense（极广大的） surprise, I won first place. When the next NASA challenge came around, I jumped in straight away. This was a little different. It was to design a radiation（发散） shield（盾） that would wrap（裹） around a future spacecraft on its way to Mars.

  And the trick was it needed to be folded down to be compact（紧凑的） enough to fit inside a small rocket（火箭）. Again, I thought, NASA is really letting people in on this? I had to think of the solution for this one for a while. But I eventually drew inspiration（灵感） from how an armadillo folds up its armor（ 盔甲）, its shield. Now, I didn't have any industrial（工业的） design or engineering skills. So I put together my submission, the best way I knew how, using the shapes tool in PowerPoint.

  I'm fairly sure most of my calculations（计算） are incorrect（不正确的）. But despite（不管） being someone who didn't have the CV or education to possibly hope for a job at NASA, they awarded me second place for this design. The freedom（自由） of the challenge actually allowed my idea to speak for itself without needing that formal education or background to prop（ 支持） it up. A few years later, after a few more second and third place entries and a whole lot of failed attempts（企图）, I had taught myself 3D modeling, 3D printing, and some basic robotics. I used these skills to participate in a higher profile challenge. For this, I designed and built a prototype（原型） for a lunar（月亮的） crane（起重机） that could help autonomously offload cargo from landers of different shapes and sizes on the moon.