You think about becoming an engineer? Well OK, let's do a little test.

We just assume you are a spectator at a football cup final. The game goes into the second period of extra time, and the score is still level. The rules are as follows: The team that scores the golden goal is the winner. The players are grimly fighting for the ball, a foul is committed in the penalty area, our team is awarded a penalty. It is a thrilling atmosphere. This will be the decisive blow. The question is: who is going to do it? Thomas and Volker are supposed to be the players with the best nerves. The team coach Ignorant discusses the question with the two players. Thomas claims that he has a better score of penalties at home as well as away compared with Volker. So, the coach Ignorant quickly makes up his mind: Thomas is supposed to do the golden goal. He puts down the ball, strikes and ... the goalkeeper saves it! And it gets worse, the confusion of the team about the lost opportunity is used by the opponents to directly score the winning goal.

The sports magazines moan about the lost game. But it was just bad luck, that's what they think, everybody gave their best. Is that true? It is definitely true for Thomas, the unlucky one, he was highly motivated. But the coach Ignorant committed a serious mistake. He should have selected Volker, because he was the better penalty-taker. You might say that's not possible. If Thomas has a better score at home as well as away, he is the better penalty-taker. It might be logical, but in this case it is wrong. Because the goal statistics of the two players show that all in all Volker is almost 50% better than Thomas and thus also the better penalty-taker, although Thomas has a better score at home and also away.

You might be really amazed thinking that there must be a mistake in the table, because it is just not possible that "better + better = worse". But that is exactly the case. Nobody cheated with the table, everything is absolutely correct.

The important point here is not that you would have given the right answer. You would not have been able to do that without knowing the detailed figures. Other figures could have meant "better + better = better". The point here is that you see that the world is not always the way you think it is. Solutions of problems are often very different from what you may think. And this is exactly where the qualities of an engineer are brought into it. He is prepared to put conventional thinking upside down, and to doubt that the previous solutions are the only ones that are correct. And he is also prepared and ready to think the unthinkable: How do you overtake a spaceship flying ahead of you in the Earth orbit? You might think by heartily accelerating, just like in StarTrek. Absolutely wrong. In the Earth orbit you have to decelerate in order to be able to overtake. You will learn the why in my astronautics lecture.

Are you prepared to face challenging tasks in the arts of engineering and especially in astronautics? Prepared to build satellites together with other highly motivated collegues, satellites that are totally different and can do many more things than other ones? Then this is the right place for you. 

I warn you, it won't be easy. But if you are good and you make it, it will be the profession you have always dreamt of!

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Walter

Institute of Astronautics

TU München, Garching