By Eric Berger
Published: March 2021
Read: September 28, 2021
Liftoff describes a life and a situation that although not as exciting as it may be I have experienced. The early days of SpaceX walk the line that is out of vogue now, but can become intoxicating if you catch it. When people have hard work to do, and are allowed to do it with almost 100% of their waking energy, great things can happen. Additionally getting the right folks on projects like this is truly helping an addict get what they need and it may never happen for more than a few years in their lives.
It may seem minor, but the early actors at SpaceX are filled with people with very little else that moves their needle than rocketry and many of those people lose other things because of the desire for space flight. The double edged sword of hard work (in my view) is that we cant have it all, you only have enough power to do so many things no matter how little you sleep and when you set off to build a rocket you either see it to the end and at all costs you can give or you go to some other job where you can be happy work and go home. I’m sure some people see that as pure madness and some see that as excitement. Maybe I’m jealous but i did notice a few details again that allowed the crew here to push everything into their work, living at the office literally, being removed from any other environment worth relaxing in (the first phase of launches described here happened in Quag totally remote) being straight out of college and obsessed with learning something for the first time.
On the optimistic side, whenever something when wrong whether it was minor corrosion on an unsealed fuel tank or something else. I got to feel the same comradely when i flipped an op amp backwards or something melted in the oven when running right to 86C when 85 was just fine. Engineering or really problem solving for its drawbacks still flips a switch for me and as I get older I can now see that as a little more of a strength than a liability.
Also orbital mechanics is one of those “hard/not hard” kind of things which is why i kept the space and Low Earth orbit theme going by reading Seveneves later in the yaer.
John (Jake) Kolb III 