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[i]The 31-year-old, who joined the MIT faculty in 2014, had become deeply—and happily—enmeshed in his academic career. He and his students had just flown a lightweight, long-duration drone built with the help of a powerful software tool for optimizing airplane design, called GPkit, that he had created. The U.S. Air Force, which has funded the work, hopes to use the drone to maintain communications during disaster relief, but Hoburg was already thinking of many other uses. His research team had "so much momentum" that it was "hard for me to just end it," he says. ...Hoburg's initial plan was to maintain a formal link with his many projects by going on temporary leave from MIT. Although Hoburg and the other astronaut candidates hope their 2 years of training at NASA's Johnson Space Center will be followed by a chance to go into space, he wanted to hedge his bets. "It's a little unclear what will happen after the training ends," he explains. So Hoburg requested a 2-year leave of absence," he says, which would have covered the initial length of training at NASA's Johnson Space Center. But MIT said no. "I was basically advised to resign," Hoburg says. "I'm not complaining. [Becoming an astronaut] is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I couldn't pass up. And it was pretty wild to be told, as a junior faculty member, that this other amazing dream of mine had come true."[/i]
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