
Is SpaceX changing the rocket equation? - bfe
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Visionary-Launchers-Employees.html
======
amirmansour
I've been an avionics intern at SpaceX for the past two years, and I can tell
you for sure that if anyone is gonna take humans to Mars it will be SpaceX.
The same goes for propulsive landing of a rocket for reusability:
[http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0&cat=rec...](http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0&cat=recent)

Everything at SpaceX is designed with reusability in mind, and every system is
highly redundant. And to top it off, they have some of the best, most
talented, and most experienced engineers out there.

With all that said, the reason why SpaceX will succeed is their culture. Most
of the company's employees are young and highly motivated (including myself I
guess). When I started my work at SpaceX, one of the engineers told me to
prepare to shed some blood and tears as well as prepare for the most stressful
yet rewarding work of your life. He was right. There were times where I did
not go home for 4 days straight (this was not recommended). They did not asked
me to do this. I just wanted to do it. The thing that is cool about SpaceX is
that you will do REAL work on you first day, and you will have a significant
impact right away. Even if you are an intern.

I know a lot people on Hacker News are essentially web programmers (Me too
actually. Django FTW). If you guys are looking for a job, they are always
hiring. One way to get hired is to start out as an intern (if you are at an
intern stage in your life). If you want to actually program the rocket, and
got some ROCK SOLID C++ programming skills, then you are exactly what SpaceX
wants. So please apply. Space exploration is hands down one of the important
pursuits we can have as civilization, so the best need to work on this
challenge in my view.

Let me tell you, there is no feeling to see something that you designed and
built actually entered outer space. I can't describe it. You just have to
experience it for yourself. So if you're bored on your current job, look into
SpaceX. Plus having Elon Musk as a boss is pretty bad ass. The guys is simply
defines legitness!

~~~
ramchip
"To conform to US Government space technology export regulations, SpaceX hires
only US citizens and US Permanent Residents."

Too bad...

~~~
rbanffy
My words exactly. Would have a lot of pre-work to do.

As an odd coincidence, I have Von Braun's (Ley's and Bonestel's too) "The
Exploration of Mars" right in front of me as I type. I have it since I was a
kid.

------
MikeCapone
_And prices are expected to rise significantly in the next few years,
according to defense department officials. Why? Musk says a lot of the answer
is in the government’s traditional “cost-plus” contracting system, which
ensures that manufacturers make a profit even if they exceed their advertised
prices. “If you were sitting at a n executive meeting at Boeing and Lockheed
and you came up with some brilliant idea to reduce the cost of Atlas or Delta,
you’d be fired,” he says. “Because you’ve got to go report to your
shareholders why you made less money. So their incentive is to maximize the
cost of a vehicle, right up to the threshold of cancellation.”_

I can't help but think of all the other places where that kind of system
operates and makes costs much higher than they should be... How much better
would the world be if fewer resources were wasted thus?

~~~
cletus
My family has been involved in both mining and construction at various times
past and present so I've seen a couple of areas where "cost plus" pricing is
used.

Generally speaking, it's a recipe for the provider to stick their snout in the
trough as far as it will go. There is absolutely no incentive to lower costs
or improve efficiencies. It does indeed become a game of brinkmanship between
maximizing costs (profits) and cancellation.

I have seen it used in construction to mitigate risk. One example springs to
mind. A particularly wealthy but eccentric individual wanted to build a lavish
home. He was notorious for changing his mind, adding to the project and so on.
The only way the company in question would touch the construction contract was
on a "cost plus" basis.

Whenever you do this you basically have to trust the provider to a certain
extent and it only really works if they trade on reputation and a hit to their
reputation actually matters (often it doesn't).

~~~
lucasjung
> _There is absolutely no incentive to lower costs or improve efficiencies._

This is almost never true with cost-plus contracts. There are normally all
sorts of incentives and written into the contract. For example, bonuses might
be paid if particular milestones are achieved ahead of schedule, or if certain
costs come in below estimates. Also, there are usually limits on reimbursement
(typically at the level of components rather than the entire project).

If used properly, these incentives and restrictions make it in the
contractor's best interest to control costs. I've never seen them used
perfectly, but they're often used reasonably well. I've also seen incentives
that were designed so poorly that the contractor just ignored them because
they weren't worth the effort to try and earn.

I think the main problem is that cost-plus pricing is often used in
circumstances where it is not appropriate. Cost-plus should generally be used
only for high-risk projects.

------
alex_c
_Talking about a city on Mars by the middle of this century—even as SpaceX has
yet to fly its first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of the reasons space
professionals are skeptical about Musk’s claims._

And yet, it's this kind of completely unrealistic goals that really pushes
things forward. Even if SpaceX only gets... dunno, 25% of the way to that
goal, chances are they'll have accomplished more than anyone else is trying.

~~~
onemoreact
NASA is about to launch a 1 ton rover on mars and even if the mission in a
compleat failure they have already sent enough stuff to the Mars that we know
a lot about the planet's geology, history, chemistry, and have a fairly high
resolution imaging of the entire surface. The only meaningful step after this
is a self sustaining colony on Mars that can exist without supply's from
earth. Everything else IMO is just showmanship.

PS: Yea I know a solid manufacturing base plus 5+ million people might seem
like several steps away, but until that happens we don't have meaningful
levels of redundancy, just an outpost that would take a while to die off. (bad
vacation)
[http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/10/22/demotivati...](http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/10/22/demotivational-
posters-bad-vacation/)

------
6ren
I think this is an answer to people who are "too smart to succeed" because
they optimize the product only. It's just a matter of optimizing _across_
domains, (e.g. trade-off cost and performance), which takes a certain
adaptability and flexibility of mind. It's a kind of lateral intelligence and
reframing which is useful in solving everything but textbook problems.

> Simplicity enables both reliability and low cost.

As Woz said - though Woz also mentioned the advantage of making it simple
enough to fully hold in his head. (<http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-
wozniak.html>). So, in a back-handed way, a limited working memory can be a
gift (though I'm not suggesting that Woz's working memory was limited).
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258655>

one page (works)
[http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&tit...](http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&title=1+visionary+%2B+3+launchers+%2B+1%2C500+employees+%3D+%3F+%7C+Space+Exploration+%7C+Air+%26+Space+Magazine&urlID=464931307&action=cpt&partnerID=285367&cid=133542138&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.airspacemag.com%2Fspace-
exploration%2FVisionary-Launchers-Employees.html%23)

~~~
gokult
This TED talk by George Whitesides titled "Towards a science of simplicity"
comes to mind -
[http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_toward_a_science_of_simplicity.html)

------
ph0rque
_“It’s very common to do component and system-level testing…. That’s very
typical in aerospace, ” says Alan Lindenmoyer of Houston’s Johnson Space
Center, who has been working with SpaceX since 2005 as manager of the agency’s
Commercial Crew and Cargo program. “But to actually put a vehicle together and
do system-level testing of the rocket is not. That’s a level of rigor you
don’t typically see.”_

So they do unit _and_ integration tests? Sounds thorough...

~~~
bfe
As part of their testing they actually pass a stainless steel nut through the
kerosene and liquid oxygen lines into the engine while it's firing, something
that would make almost any other rocket engine explode. It sounds like to say
they do more thorough testing than their competitors is an understatement.

~~~
nobody31415926
In other words it's the sort of testing a commercial aircraft engine maker
would do - not what nasa would do.

The engines on your 777 are designed so that a 6ft long fan blade moving
faster than the speed of sound can break off and not go through the engine
cowling and into your lap. They blow up $30M engines in testing to prove this

~~~
masklinn
> In other words it's the sort of testing a commercial aircraft engine maker
> would do - not what nasa would do.

I think that's a very good way to put it: nasa gets rockets built so they
work, all of their engineering is built so it's as perfect as can be from the
start. It's a huge cost, but it allows them not to blow up rockets in testing.
SpaceX sees that as spaceworthy aircraft-building, they drive up-front costs
lower by not focusing as much on design reliability and instead blow up engine
to test how they behave.

~~~
Maakuth
This would be true if rockets actually never exploded. But it seems to me they
actually do, and that's why it's useful to test very unfortunate scenarios as
well. It's not like they design jet engines' blades to come loose and cause
destruction, but they - or some aviation authority - have decided that the
engines should not explode even in a case of blade separation. I find it a lot
more comforting to know jet engine is tested to not explode in such situation
than I would if I was told jet engines are designed perfect. Because
perfection is not something engineering can achieve, only extremely small
probabilities of failure.

~~~
qntm
I think the difference there is that when a 747 engine explodes, there are
three other engines and the plane may well still be landable. When a Space
Shuttle engine explodes, everybody is almost certainly dead and the Shuttle
crashes.

I'm saying that pragmatically, unrecoverable errors don't need testing, and
NASA's class of possible unrecoverable errors is much wider than any
airline's. The fact that SpaceX feels the need to test so rigorously is a good
sign about what they want to be "recoverable" and therefore about how safe
their hardware is intended to be.

~~~
mikeash
A lot more rocket failures are recoverable than you might think, though.

Engines can fail in many ways that don't destroy everything. Apollo 13 nearly
became famous for exploding on launch due to massive resonant vibration, but a
premature shutdown of the affected engine saved it. (Oddly, that shutdown was
due to a mistaken fuel level reading, not the vibrations directly, so the save
was something of an accident.) At least one Shuttle launch experienced an
engine failure/shutdown as well. These engines didn't _explode_ , of course,
but there's a whole range of failures and many can be planned for.

Even when the entire thing does explode, you can still save your crew if
you've planned properly. A Soyuz capsule's escape system saved its crew when
the rocket exploded in 1983.

It appears to me that NASA's approach is to prefer systems which can't fail
over systems which can fail safely. On the surface, this seems better, but
when your foolproof system still fails and you haven't built it to withstand
that, then you're in serious trouble.

I don't think there's any inherent reason why shedding a turbine blade during
a rocket launch has to destroy the entire vehicle. Designing the system to
withstand that makes it heavier and not perform as well, of course, but it
seems like an overemphasis on performance while disregarding nearly everything
else has really hurt space technology.

~~~
kens
A few random comments:

There's a video of the Soyuz explosion mentioned above at
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag&noredirect=1](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag&noredirect=1)
that shows the escape system saving the crew.

The use of solid rocket boosters for human space flight (as was planned for
Ares I) is hugely controversial because they can't just be shut down in the
event of a problem, as regular engines can, making survivability more
difficult.

Personally, I think NASA is overly risk-adverse, to the point that nothing
gets accomplished (see Constellation / Ares I). An interesting article on this
is <http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/news/4330356>

On the topic of aircraft turbine failures, there's the interesting case of a
DC-10 engine that disintegrated in flight due to a pilot experiment, killing a
passenger. For details see:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_27>

Finally, if you're interested in SpaceX, NASA budgeting, and so forth, I
recommend <http://nasawatch.com>

------
kore
I'm inspired by this man's dreams and the way he's striving for it, even
though the end goal is decades off.

 _Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars.
Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he
outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks
decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to
around the cost of a middle class home in California—maybe to around half a
million dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move to
Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and
adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there’ll be
probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a
million people decided to do that, that’s still eight thousand people. And I
think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.”_

------
ethanpil
The greatest point of the article: Patents have become bullshit.

Here is the quote: They don’t even file patents, Musk says, because “we try
not to provide a recipe by which China can copy us and we find our inventions
coming right back at us.”

~~~
bfe
It's long been standard IP management to weigh between patents and trade
secrets based on the specifics of a case.

~~~
nobody31415926
Especially if nobody ever gets to see your finished product in one piece -
people generally don't file patents on bombs for example.

Although ironically the Germans did file a patent on an anti-handling bomb
fuse that they subsequently used in WWII

------
burgerbrain
It is no exaggeration to say that SpaceX gives me hope for the future of
humanity.

Godspeed Elon Musk.

------
erikpukinskis
Watching the rocket re-use video, I realized that Elon Musk is not just
building a space commerce empire, he's actually putting himself in a position
where he could be the world's first true supervillain.

Not that I think that's what he's up to, but if he has a lair on Mars, and
controls the galaxy's only fleet of interplanetary missiles.... he could ask
for quite a ransom. The parallels to Ozymandias are a little scary.

Just sayin'.

~~~
simondlr
Elon feels like a real-world Iron Man.

~~~
NickPollard
Funny you should say that, Jon Favreau has said that Elon Musk was the basis
for much of the portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron man films.

(He also has a cameo in Iron Man 2, and the SpaceX lab was used as a set).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk>

~~~
mahmud
Geez, Musk & Shuttleworth are both South Africans.

------
Joakal
As long ITAR exists, the rest of the world will eventually overshadow USA [0]
for peaceful ventures into space. Also, SpaceX is competing against very
entrenched corporations that resorts to many tactics [1]. For SpaceX to
advance USA's space technology, they'd have to submit to military expensive
contracts too, militarising space. I really wish I could support American
space companies.

[0]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_terrible_thorn_in_our_side_lets_have_a/c2b9oum)

[1] [http://www.space.com/1701-spacex-sues-boeing-lockheed-
martin...](http://www.space.com/1701-spacex-sues-boeing-lockheed-martin.html)

Edit: Why am I being downvoted? That ITAR makes USA alone in space travel?

~~~
dantheman
How does ITAR make the rest of the world overshadow the US?

~~~
Joakal
That thread has some discussion of ITAR limitations including the heavy
bureaucracy of dealing in anything remotely space technology as state secrets.
The whole thread I'm referring to:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_t...](http://www.reddit.com/r/tothemoon/comments/jca8h/itar_is_a_terrible_thorn_in_our_side_lets_have_a/)

------
bfe
This article discusses how SpaceX seems to be able to get things done faster,
for less expense, and with better performance, than any of its competitors --
partly because they care more about the end result of being able to send stuff
and people into space and to Mars instead of just selling launches.

------
MikeCapone
It's a Linux-powered rocket too!

 _The Falcon 9 was designed from the beginning to be human-rated, meaning an
increased focus on reliability. The rocket’s avionics and controls are triple-
redundant (as will be some sensors in the human-rated version of the Atlas V),
and the flight computers, which run on Linux, will “issue the right commands
even if there’s severe damage to the system,” Musk says._

~~~
cop359
That's actually very weird. Wouldn't having an OS like Linux make it so you
can't guarantee computation times and guarantee exactly when processes will
start and end?

I don't really know much about OS's but I'd write control systems in a pure
language compiled directly to machine code with no OS. That way you would have
certain guarantees of execution and auditing the code would be significantly
cheaper. I remember hearing that auditing code for satellites is outrageously
expensive because most languages have side effects. So it's thousands and
thousands of dollars per line of code to guarantee that it'll do what it says
it will do regardless of execution path.

~~~
asharp
There are hard realtime patches to linux and have been since 2.4

I'd imagine that there would be some previously tested (say in aerospace)
linux derivative that they'd be building off.

To be perfectly honest though, I don't know why they arn't using one of the
few really good commercial hard real time unix kernels that you use for, say,
UAV's and such.

~~~
kristoffer
I don't see the point of using something as complex as a unix kernel for an
embedded real time system. There exists an open source RTOS with a lot of
space flight history called RTEMS, www.rtems.org. That might be a good choice.

Also I'm not sure they actually are using Linux to control the rockets since
that would pretty much make them impossible to qualify for human space travel
(i.e. DO-178B qualification).

EDIT: Looking at their jobs site it seems they are using VxWorks. This is more
reasonable ...

------
bobwaycott
I love space and programming more than anything. This article just filled my
head with a bajillion ideas and made me wonder why on earth I haven't thought
before about chasing both in my career choices.

A very inspiring read, complete with such nice asides about how operating as a
startup with a mission can get so much fun _and_ work accomplished, and shows
that serving the interests of shareholders and profits first can utterly
derail accomplishing your mission.

------
brc
It's interesting how they attribute so much of their success to Apollo program
information. So much data must have been created during that program - I
wonder how much of it is sitting on dusty shelves unused?

I've often wondered what type of improvements you could make if you built a
Saturn V type rocket with modern technology and materials. It looks like we're
probably going to find out over the next ten years.

~~~
DanBC
Saturn 5 is lost technology. The build was split up over a bunch of different
sub contractors. There's no central repository for plans. Some plans are lost
forever; others are in basements or attics of various engineers. There was no
single group of engineers who know how to put together a Saturn 5.

Yes; it's be cool to see old designs meet new methods. But it's also cool to
see what modern materials and chemistry can do.

~~~
cstross
Also: NASA built a grand total of 18 Saturn V stacks. Then they shut down the
production lines. With just 18 vehicles, completed years before the actual
flight missions, each and every one of them was a prototype: the rocket
engineers working on them had worked on multiple prototype missiles before,
and a whole lot of snags and bugs were hand-patched on each vehicle. Even if
we could magic up a complete set of designs and build new production lines
based on them, we'd have lost a chunk of the hands-on knowledge of how to fix
problems with the design (stuff that wasn't recorded by a process that
predated ISO9000 and similar QA protocols).

Also, people tend to over-estimate the SV stack. As it happened, in its first
iteration it was _barely_ capable of the mission -- the LEM came in
overweight, and only the fact that the SV out-performed its design specs by a
couple of percent made the Block 1 lunar missions possible. (By Block 2 --
Apollo 15-17 -- they'd tweaked enough things that they could fly a heavier LEM
with the lunar rover kit and additional supplies.)

In contrast, you might find Musk's plans for Falcon Heavy interesting:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy>

16,000Kg to translunar injection, 14,000Kg to Mars. It's not up to flying an
Apollo mission profile (the LEM weighed 14,700Kg; the CSM stack 30,300Kg) but
it's capable of putting a LEM-sized payload into Lunar orbit, and it might be
possible to rig up some kind of lunar-orbit rendezvous profile surface mission
using 2-3 Falcon Heavy launches.

~~~
brc
Of the 18 built, how many were fired (and presumably never recovered?)
Obviously there is the one in the KSC Saturn building, but are there others
lying around?

One thing I have noticed about NASA developments - the payload weights never
seem to come down. I would have thought we could build a LEM with the same or
greater functionality at a lower weight by now.

------
bcl
Clearly they are. They have shown what can be done when you take proven
designs and techniques and skip the bureaucratic BS that is inherent in being
a NASA, Boeing, etc.

------
kiba
Hmm, if they can get rocket cheap, they can make their rocket safer over time,
because you can test more and more of them.

~~~
wonjohnchoi
Totally agreed

------
tzury
Single Page version (+ Readability)

<http://www.readability.com/articles/2pzowoyw>

------
RobPfeifer
Does anyone have any idea how to figure out what their "energy per Pound to
orbit" is and how it might compare to their competition? Would be curious as
their relative efficiencies.

~~~
mkn
It turns out that "relative efficiencies" from an energy standpoint is not the
relevant consideration, by two or three orders of magnitude.

Fuel costs for launch vehicles are a negligible fraction of the total cost to
fly. Musk is working the rest of the problem by simplifying the design,
designing for manufacturability, using off-optimum technologies, building
everything under one roof, and so on.

------
martythemaniak
"On the flight home, he recalls, “I was trying to understand why rockets were
so expensive. Obviously the lowest cost you can make anything for is the spot
value of the material constituents. And that’s if you had a magic wand and
could rearrange the atoms. So there’s just a question of how efficient you can
be about getting the atoms from raw material state to rocket shape.”

Brilliant.

------
dantheman
I loved this article, very inspiring. It's great to see good news reported. I
want to go to Mars.

~~~
robotresearcher
The author is Andrew Chaikin. He's a good writer and the archetypal space nut.
His book on Apollo is terrific.

<http://www.andrewchaikin.com/>

------
dirtyaura
If you are, like me, interested to learn more about Space X, watch Musk's AIAA
2011 Keynote. Q&A session covers a few interesting technical problems. He
talks about costs, reusability, vertical launch, nuclear propulsion etc.

Part 1 is here <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTpZEKDShWM>, but Q&A starts at
5 mins into part 2 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjzMs4nvfcc>

~~~
dirtyaura
Also one point was very interesting: Musk doesn't see business potential in
mining minerals from moon or Mars ("Earth has a lot of stuff in its crust and
Earth is big"), but thinks that there are lot of people willing to move to
space.

------
FrojoS
I really wish there was a good way for non-americans to contribute to SpaceX.
While their spare use of external suppliers seems to make sense, it makes it
even harder to contribute. I find it sad that the potentially biggest
undertaking of mankind is once again an USA only party - run by a foreigner
(Musk).

Well at least everyone will be able to buy SpaceX shares once they have an
IPO.

------
johnyzee
SpaceX claims to be able to manufacture cheaper than China while being more
thorough than NASA, all the while developing and building their components in-
house. I would love for all this to be true but would have to remain sceptical
for the time being.

------
mprovost
But can you buy insurance for their launches?

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.single.html)

------
amirmansour
UPDATE: I'm posting this comment to address some of the questions you guys
asked.

I'm actually an Computer Science guy stuck in the body of an Electrical
Engineer. I mostly design hardware, however in my first year I did a good
amount of highly optimized embedded systems programming. I wish I could go
into more detail but that's against company policy.

However, my high school (the good old days) robotics mentors that also work at
SpaceX are the top developers of the avionics software. What they mostly do is
program the flight computer. Also the code that just brings every little
sensor data together. Again I would really love to sit here and talk to you
guys about the technical details, but I'm simply not allowed. So sorry for the
broad sentences.

Regarding the type of people that get hired. As I said SpaceX hires the BEST.
As an intern, KEN BOWERSOX, an amazing astronaut sat 2 desks away from me. I
could have walked up to the guy at anytime and ask him how it was like in
space. Look at this list of people running the company:
<http://www.spacex.com/company.php> After reading that you see how top notch
these people are. The same goes for their employees.

SpaceX hires from everywhere, but it seems they are really into the
stereotypical TOP engineering schools. It felt like everyone was from
Stanford. A lot of people from University of Michigan, Carnegie Melon, and
MIT. The company is in California, but it felt like that a huge chunk of the
company was recruited from outside the state. Just go into the parking lot,
and you can see license plates from every state (I saw one from Maine...long
ass drive). There were few interns from the University of California system
(like myself).

If you guys want to apply, I want to not just tell you all the good stuff.
There is also the not so pretty side. Be prepared to give the job your
everything. Specially if you are a young engineer because you mostly likely
don't have any experience under your belt to make you an irreplaceable asset.
Also people forget that SpaceX is a STARTUP. Yes they have 1500 employees. But
this is not some little photo sharing iPhone app company (no offense guys, you
really need stop with those). It's an aerospace startup, which means 1500
employees is pretty much a small amount of people. Also Elon Musk has this
philosophy where a small amount of people can achieve BIG things. With that
said they are hiring like crazy last time I checked (which was like 2 months
ago).

Since it is a startup, job security is not good. Since the people they hire
are very good, they mostly don't get fired. But at the same time the
deadlines, and goals can sometimes seem like a fantasy. This sometimes leads
to people getting fired. This happened a lot during my stay.

With all that said, from working at Jet Propulsion Lab, and now SpaceX my goal
is turn my current graduate research into a startup. I've learned that I'm
simply not the type of person that can work for others for the rest of my
life. Graduating with an engineering degree and doing 9 to 5 stressful job
will get old very fast. After my stay at SpaceX I already feel burned out (I
worked on some high priority projects). However, I am really passionate about
my current project (I can't stop thinking about it), and my goal is to turn
that into a company. Unfortunately, I might have to say goodbye to SpaceX to
pursue this dream.

~~~
FrojoS
Thanks a lot for the insight. Fellow Mechatronics Engineer here. Would you
like to elaborate on that project of yours? I'm really interested.

