About

My name is Ben Wright McGee.  Born in the Rockies and raised in Sin City, I’m a chronically-optimistic geoscientist who’s spent his life chasing the stars.

This blog is a record of my quest to “get off the rock,” as I like to say, along with a healthy streak of science outreach covering relevant news and topics.

Unlike so many of my peers with similar aspirations, I decided to chance charting a completely errant (by traditional standards) course toward space; I’m playing the calculated odds that, ultimately, the orbit-less-traveled might just be the one that pays off…

With an eye toward picking up where humanity’s one-and-only field planetary geologist left off on the Moon in 1972, I left academia after earning my Bachelor’s degree in 2005 in a effort to hone the field skills I’m gambling will be most necessary of a future career scientist-astronaut, (or as I like to refer to it, an “astrowright“).

Since then, I’ve worked professionally as a geologist, hydrologist, environmental scientist, radiological engineer, author, emergency responder, adjunct college instructor, and even ended up in a stint here-and-there as a host for popular science TV projects.

Analyzing active hydrothermal spring properties, Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah.

Having literally and metaphorically scuffed up my field boots in the harshest, most alien scientific environments that industry had to offer me, (adventuring across glaciers, racing over desert lakebeds, forging up the sides of freezing mountain streams, plunging into jungles, or diving into radioactive craters to collect data, which earned me the recent honor of being a National Fellow of the Explorers Club), I jumped back into academia part-time in 2010 to tackle a Masters in Space Studies with an emphasis in nuclear thermal rocketry.

In 2011, I founded Astrowright Spaceflight Consulting LLC, a commercial spaceflight support services firm, expanded it in 2012 to include GammaSonic Instruments – a nuclear laboratory, and in 2014 I joined Bigelow Aerospace as a Lead Scientist in the Crew Systems group for the groundbreaking B330 spacecraft.

Now, when I’m not helping design spaceflight systems, I moonlight as a freelance jazz musician, an occasional TV host on Travel Channel, and I enjoy writing thriller science fiction adventures.

I’ve a knack for connecting dots that haven’t yet been connected, and as a pathological scientist, my published research interests are varied.  These include exotic sediment transport processes in nature, intersections of archaeology and space science, intersections of nuclear engineering and geology, and finding viable reinterpretations of astrophysics models – particularly as they relate to what I suspect might be an incomplete understanding of the fundamental nature of time.

So, feel free to stop by and read for a spell, or contact me if you’d like.  My email server’s door, as it were, is always open.

For the interested, my personal website (with more contact info) can be found here, and my Twitter feed is here.  A blog series I kept on the National Geographic Channel’s website relating to a TV project I was involved with can be found here, and a separate blog with my thoughts as a scientist on politics (reader warned!) can be found here.

Above all, thanks for reading/visiting, and no matter what your passions, Semper Exploro! – Always Explore!

Snagging geohydrologic data from an old military MX well in central Nevada.

[NOTE: All views expressed are my own and do not reflect the views or endorsement of any business entities with which I am affiliated!]