This week after over a decade of development, some of my dearest friends are launching people into space. I only worked with them for a couple years, but they’ve touched my life in so many ways and we’ve stayed friends since. I’ll never forget the excitement of my first launch.
I’m rooting for them, and for humanity.
LETS GET BACK UP THERE! GO FALCON GO DRAGON! ( I love you guys. )
~10 years ago I got a call out of the blue from Tom H, structures recruiter for Space Exploration Technologies, a company I’d never heard of in Los Angeles. I was really into robotics and never had an interested in rockets (they’d been done before, or so I thought). But Tom was interested in me, and what I’d done in college ( built a humanoid robot ), so he talked my ear off for about an hour and asked me all sorts of questions about my background.
Now, this was peak financial collapse job market ( 2010 ), and every interview I’d been to thus far was pretty hum-drum standard for a new grad. But this felt different. Tom was talking to me like I was an intelligent person, not a block on a process diagram. And he had that California ” dude, totally ” way of talking that made me think, whatever this NASA parts supplier is, maybe I should at least get a free trip to LA out of this, broseph.
A couple weeks and a flight across America later, I parked my rental car next to a red tesla roadster in the visitor’s spot, and I walked into an old 737 quest fuselage plant masquerading as a space program. The receptionist knew my name. The front door was made of glass. There was a rocket engine in the lobby ( an old Merlin 1-C ). The whole room was white and there was a live white orchid on the receptionist’s desk. I thought I’d walked into a movie. ( this scene from Iron Man 2 was shot in that lobby :P)
What followed was probably the hardest interview so far in my life, but also the most amazing facility tour (this video was shot just before I started) I’d ever been on. I was floored that half the team were in hawaiian shirts and flip flops. The next two and a half years were a blur, I went from never made a thing out of steel to designing the largest rocket launchpad in the world in just a few months, and by the time I’d left, I had done more engineering than I’ve probably done since. SpaceX was one of the most amazing positive things that has happened in my life.
I got to walk around pads at the Cape, and Vandenberg, sit in the control room and direct operations, even lift designs from the russians. I convinced a bunch of my friends I had met in LA to come join me at SpaceX ( a few of them are still there ) and I found a lot of friends in the people I met there that I still have to this day. I got inspired to care about getting people into Space. I feel like many people in my generation think of spaceflight as something that happened in the 60’s and is mostly over.
I made tight connections with people in pretty much every group and I’ve kept tabs on their progress over the last decade, and to say it’s been remarkable would be an understatement. Tiny teams of amazing engineers have been absolutely slamming hardware out the door to get ready to put people back in space, this time not as a national challenge, but as a business. I’m starting to see them make Mars a project that’s not just an idea on paper. It’s truly amazing.
All of the hard work that’s been going on at SpaceX is about to reach a new high watermark this week, as they’re about to send up astronauts. Thousands of engineers, technicians, interns, and even the odd barista have pulled together to make this happen, and it’s been a ton of extremely hard work. So many moments with family have been missed, and people have given literally the best years of their lives to this mission. Some have passed along the way and it tears my heart out that they didn’t get to see this. But a few NASA astronauts were never the point of it, or the end of it.
When Wernher Von Braun ( the namesake of the largest conference room at SpaceX) chief engineer of Saturn V (the largest rocket ever flown ) set out to put humans on the moon, his goal wasn’t to just visit. He wanted humanity to expand to the stars, to establish a permanent presence in space and push onto Mars. To explore the high frontier.
Somewhere along the way we lost that vision and fell into a complacent pattern of screwing around in low earth orbit. Only about 570 people have been to space. It still costs millions to put a person up. SpaceX is the first ( and I think still the only ) group of humans that have a shot at permanently changing that.
They are probably the smartest and best people among us to do it. It’s not what it was in the early days anymore, not as many “rebel without a cause” types on the warpath to get the impossible done in no time at all. Along the way they’ve picked up a lot of maturity, and sure, people have left the team ( I left myself after a couple solid years and amazing projects ), but it’s exciting to keep watching the progress happen, keep meeting new young people that join up with starry eyes and big ambitions. I still recommend to any younger bright engineers I meet to give it a shot at SpaceX, as it’s a unique experience worth having, and your life even if for a moment, will have been a part of something much bigger.
The road won’t be without struggle and turmoil, but I think they’re set up to make it to Mars now. Watching a bunch of old timers and kids take a water tower and make it hover around Texas has shown that SpaceX hasn’t grown into the crusty old aerospace companies it’s overtaking, but is still a group of crazy idiot pyros with a little more smarts than sense and a passion for the extreme. I think Elon is a big part of that but there are a lot of people on the team that push for that kind of movement, it’s a cultural thing. That’s what Apollo was, and that’s what we’re going to need to get to Mars.
So when you watch Puff the Magic Dragon fly some squishy meatbags to ISS next week, remember, this isn’t just another NASA sideshow, this is a milestone on the path to Mars, and in our lifetimes, if these Space Cowboys manage to pull it off, you or me might be on that next flight out to Vallis Marinaras.
Good luck and Godspeed to my friends still at the X, and to those out in the rest of the world, I’ll keep looking up,
(until one day, when I can look down, from space )