As a sophomore in high school who hasn’t taken Calculus or Physics yet I would try those first before deciding you are bad a math. If you have a goal in mind and work hard I bet you can do well. You have a long way to go with math if you want to be a physicist or an engineer but don’t count yourself out before you even start. Calculus sounds scary but it’s not really much harder than algebra, it’s just a new set of rules.

I didn’t think I was that smart in high school and now 10 years later I research and develop magnet retention methods for electric motors in aerospace as a R&D mechanical engineer.

P.S. NASA has low pay from the postings I have seen. Not a reason to not go for it but always something to keep in mind.

That’s the point of pure research. R&D is both research and development and it generally aims to solve a problem. Research is done by universities more often while R&D is done by industry. That’s not to say that university research can’t look to solve a problem.

I am an R&D engineer and the number of companies that fund research that doesn’t solve a problem is very very few.

A foldable phone tried to solve the problem of allowing for a larger screen while fitting in a pocket. There was a problem to solve. Studying butterfly migration for the sake of understanding them better is research that doesn’t solve a problem directly.