
Confessions of a Private Space Rocket Engineer - fmstephe
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a17750/confessions-of-a-private-space-rocket-engineer-masten/
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fezz
"traveling several hours for a coffee date"

Guys I know at SpaceX don't have time for dates because they're working late
every night of the week or have given up on relationships after having failed
ones because of working too much.

~~~
shostack
Serious question...why are they still there? Do they believe that strongly in
what they are doing to make those kinds of sacrifices with their personal life
and health?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Probably. If you buy into the vision, as many geeks-turned-engineers do, it's
perfectly reasonable to make those sacrifices. Hell, if I were an American
citizen, I'd be doing everything to join the party (instead, I'm trying to
figure out if I can help out over at ESA somehow).

~~~
jk4930
Additionally to ESA, the national agencies and the established players,
there's a still small but growing private space industry (or NewSpace or Space
2.0) in Europe. Interested?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Oh hell yes! I didn't realize we had any private space industry in Europe
(besides the fine folks at Copenhagen Suborbitals, who are a non-profit).
Could you provide more details? Thanks!

~~~
jk4930
Basically we have (a) small satellites / nanosats / CubeSats, there are
several companies in the EU like SSTL in the UK or Berlin Space Technologies,
(b) new launchers (aiming for the satellite market first) like Swiss Space
Systems and (c) those shooting for the Moon like Part-Time Scientists (I'm
involved). That's the upstream side.

Downstream would be typical satellite applications (usually communication,
navigation, imaging / Earth observation), though I don't know their names out
of my head. Sometimes one sees a crowdfunding campaign aiming for some novel
application. The lunar applications are mostly different, more on the space
science and space mining side.

And of course many things not directly doing rocket science. Just some ideas:
space suit sensor networks, big data and analytics for spaceflight medicine
R&D, AI for autonomous vehicles or on-site assessments a.s.o. Could be done
via established smaller suppliers (e.g. co-funded via Horizon 2020 grants) or
own project / startup attempts. Even quite a few of the established players
moderately embrace the digitalization and automation wave, so they're open for
novel techniques and approaches.

One could get involved with one of the many Mars Society chapters and see
whether one could spin off something there.

Our challenge is to create a European private space ecosystem. Luckily we have
tech and talent, but compared to the US we're small, underfunded, not well
connected. Part of my work is to change that, but I'm still preparing.

There's an older post of mine re the GLXP:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916217)

Since you're into Lisp, you perhaps like this one:
[http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html](http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-
lisp.html)

