Decade

I’m going to spend an hour or two trying to describe what’s happened that matters to me over the last ten years. If that seems absurd to you, I’ll agree, but I’ll also suggest that people try to explain events like centuries of history, world wars, or even the Cuban missile crisis in a few years of scholarship and a few hundred pages of text. All of history is a journey in a little open boat through a vast dark ocean. Perhaps you’ll entertain a short jaunt of my own.

When the 2010s began I was 20 years old. I had three semesters to go in my undergrad education and I fully expected to proceed immediately toward a PhD in aerospace engineering after that. My professional experience consisted of one summer lifeguarding and one summer internship at a little new space startup no one had heard of called Blue Origin. I’d never been across the equator or east of Venice, I was too young to drink, I’d never been married, never seen a total solar eclipse, and never owned a car. I was a virgin both in the literal sense and to most of the experiences adult life has to offer. My grandfather Obbie, my mentor from SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) Darrel Cain, my brother Matt, my Lechner mom Sarah Luna, and my uncle Ted were with us, as were Christina-Taylor Green, Christopher Hitchens, Robin Williams, David Bowie, John Glenn, John McCain, George HW Bush, Rachel Held Evans, and a billion or two more people who walked the Earth then who are gone now. 9 of the 12 moonwalkers were alive on January 1, 2010. After the passing of Armstrong, Mitchell, Cernan, Bean, and Young, we’re down to four.

Besides the people what else did I lose? I had to jettison some expectations and ideas about myself in the first part of the decade. I was used to casually succeeding in academics. I don’t mean that I slacked off, but I trusted that things just always worked out for me. That kind of attitude works until it doesn’t. I saw my options for grad school as more or less equivalent and decided to stick around College Station for at least a masters, and maybe all the way to a PhD. After graduating summa cum laude with my BS and meeting the woman I would ultimately marry and many of my good friends this seemed like an almost self-evident decision. The year of grad school that followed was a disaster professionally. I accomplished nothing and alienated the faculty. In retrospect it’s easy to see that this was a dumb decision. The kind of work I’m interested in doing just isn’t what this department does. I was lucky that Boeing provided a graceful exit for me after throwing a year of my professional life in the toilet and losing my funding. I made my way to Seattle in the winter between 2012 and 2013 to start my career in the structural test lab at Boeing Field. So my career of hopping from one opportunity to another in aerospace began.

The gap between 20 and 30 is an interesting period in human development. I wasn’t really a child at the start of the decade, but my prefrontal cortex was still immature and I still did the dumb impulsive stuff teenagers and young adults do (see previous paragraph regarding grad school). Most people feel an urge to rebel at this age, though the intensity and form with which this manifests is different for everyone. In that time before 2016, living in Texas, it was easy to rebel against the way I was raised in a traditionalist way. Sarah and I were no longer dating at the start of the decade, but she still exerted a gravity-like pull on me. When she started going to Catholic masses I was intrigued. When I was in Brazil that first summer (or winter, depending on your frame of reference), getting the academic tar beaten out of me by aerothermodynamics and computational structures classes, I felt the prototype of the despair that became all too familiar later in the decade. I wanted something besides restless ambition to make my life meaningful. Somehow Catholicism and I clicked.

I started going to mass when I arrived back in the US. I went to classes about becoming Catholic. Nobody made me do this. There was no pressure driving this as a reaction. It was traction. Like a homing beacon something kept calling me back to the kneelers each Sunday. Cynicism is the easiest philosophy. Maybe it was just the choir of beautiful young women in their beautiful dresses, singing so sweetly it made you want to cry. Maybe I just liked incense, and feeling like something happened in church besides your mom offering you gum, and hearing the homilies of a priest who would shout things like “There is no God who’s a big bearded white guy in the sky!” In any case I was hooked, and I intuitively understood this years before I rationally accepted that I was going to become Catholic in a full, official way.

My rational mind has never fit this transition completely. I spend too much time embracing things the church officially opposes and wondering if it’s all just a big scam to ever feel like I’m a “good” Catholic. The public practice of Christianity has been so thoroughly poisoned by its association with political conservatism over the last half-decade that I’m not sure I could’ve travelled this road now. Perhaps, one can hope, there really is a God who gives people just what they need at just the right time.

Sarah was not the reason I became Catholic. She was the center of a completely different plot that was just as consuming. In 2007 we met and fell in love. In 2008 our love blossomed and grew. In 2009 it fell apart. I began the decade with a feeling that something wasn’t quite right with that arrangement. I told Sarah on one of the last days of the last decade that I had no idea if I wanted to spend my life with her, but that I wanted to be with her that day, and the day after that, and it seemed like something generalizable. “I want to spend tomorrow with you,” I told her.

It didn’t work out. SpaceX, another little space startup barely anybody had heard of and that was mercilessly ridiculed by the old farts of the aerospace world, launched its first Falcon 9 as spring became summer that first year. Somehow the company had survived its near failure in 2008, and that first of the new breed made it to orbit on the first try. I walked through a park the night after that launch with a woman named Susie, and she kissed me exuberantly in the hot desert air. It was one of those moments that was so good it made the whole universe seem perfect and alive. Our worlds were too far apart, and nothing came of it but a friendship that sadly withered on the vine. 2011 passed without the grace of romance. I still felt something for Sarah. Not longing, not pining, just a nagging toothache sense that I wanted her to be happy and to know what was going on in her life and that I wanted us to matter to each other. The analogy occurred to me that love was something like an irreversible process in thermodynamics. This kind of love, in my brain, can be turned on but it can’t really be turned off, the same way ice readily melts on the surface of a warming pond but never spontaneously comes into being there. Over the internet, in 2013, I met a wonderful, beautiful woman who brought joy to my heart and mind. But she lived in New Jersey and I was now living in Seattle. It didn’t work out.

At the end of 2013, when I made the decision to become Catholic, I asked Sarah if she was interested in trying to be a couple again. Did that make sense? She was living in Houston, 1,400 miles away from me. There are dwarf planets with diameters smaller than that. We hadn’t been romantically involved for years and she was the one who initiated our breakup to begin with. She said yes, first to dating, then when I asked her casually if she wanted to get married, then when I asked her “for real,” then when I asked if we might move our wedding date from May of 2015 up to December of 2014. Somehow I’d stepped onto a linear accelerator into the future.

Part of me feels awkward trying to describe my love for Sarah. I see so many people I’m connected to describing their partners and marriages in the superlative ways I expect to see people selling cars or buttering up scholarship committees. Should I tell you that Sarah is the most clever, kind, intelligent, beautiful, wonderful, shiny, glorious person who I’ve ever met in my life and who’s probably ever lived? What would it mean to you, or more important, to her, if I do that? She’s enough. Not in a mediocre way; I mean her life is enough for me to wed my life to. She has given me the grace of her body, mind, and soul. I owe her everything, and even that isn’t really what’s going on here. I have seen the life that moves in Sarah, and seen that it’s good, and no matter how I might wander in my life I must now always wander back to her. We spent half the decade married, and this has been my experience so far.

One happy side effect of marrying Sarah is that it helped moved my career in the direction I wanted it moved anyway. I married a doctor, which made Sarah my lady and made me medicine’s bitch. She was assigned to a residency in Los Angeles. In that case I would do well to find work there. On Halloween of 2014, VSS Enterprise, the first SpaceShipTwo, crashed in the first fatal accident of a vehicle intended for human spaceflight since the Columbia disaster. This was a tragedy that shocked Richard Branson and the Virgin spaceflight team, and part of the recovery boosted the effort to develop a small orbital launch vehicle at Virgin Galactic. How grateful I am for that effort. Looking back at my 2015 resume, I don’t see much that identifies me as a potential rocket scientist, but I was hired as a propulsion design engineer nonetheless. I hated driving back and forth between Los Feliz and Long Beach five days a week, but my goodness, I got to be a real life rocket scientist.

I’m the middle child in my family, and somehow I’ve grown into the tropes and clichés of middle children to an almost comic level in my career. I was put in charge of the propulsion systems that connect the engine to the stage on the first stage of LauncherOne as it was being redesigned and developed into the vehicle that’s now being prepared to fly into orbit in Mojave. I spent part of my time designing parts and systems, part of my time brainstorming how to solve the problems we were digging up each day, and a large chunk of my time mediating the various conflicting issues that come up between people who make engines, people who make tanks, and people who make computers. The middle child mediated, and I didn’t put my signature on anything as exciting as an injector or a propellant tank, but I helped keep things glued together (sometimes literally) for more than three years at the place that became Virgin Orbit. Sometimes I was fed up with my co-workers, but most of the time I loved working with them, joking with them, marveling at how young and beautiful and clever we all were. I’ve never worked at a place more young and cosmopolitan and feminine than Virgin Orbit propulsion. I hope someday I’ll be able to do that again.

We all have our biases when we search the past and report our histories. Here’s my big bias during this time: Intern year, Isaac, residency, Lucy. Sarah and I were married, and almost immediately Isaac was on the way. Should we have used birth control and delayed children until after residency? Speaking strictly practically, that would’ve made sense. The Catholic identities we’d adopted opposed that, though, and I think both of us had some romantic notion against it anyway. We wanted to be a garden, young, beautiful, and alive. Sometimes in life you get what you ask for.

Being pregnant and an intern would’ve been tough enough. Then Isaac was born. How else can I describe it? One life ended and another began. I felt as though I was no longer the protagonist of my own story. I became a fanatic, convinced that any and all sufferings could and must be endured in my son’s name. That’s what happens to healthy, well-adjusted people when they become parents. Most parents are not trying to work as launch vehicle engineers and train as a doctors at the same time. In retrospect it was probably too much. Maybe it still is.

It’s difficult for me to describe just how painful the experience of residency mixed with young childhood and the challenges of living in southern California were. A typical day would’ve ranked as one of the most stressful days of the year for any of my years before having children. We had over a thousand days like that back to back. After a while your brain just wears out. I was already moodier, more sensitive, darker, after my brother Matt died in 2014. The constant feeling that I was doing less at the office than my peers, and Sarah would always be working more and in shittier conditions than me, and that my child, then children had to be taken care of no matter what, and I had to make sure their lives were not just adequate but good was just more. More than I’d ever like to have again in my life. Living outside your comfort zone and challenging yourself are great things to do, in moderation. In the back half of the last decade my life with Sarah became completely immoderate. How painful was it? Don’t be a doctor. Tell your children not to be doctors. That’s how painful it was.

It didn’t help that American politics shit the bed in the middle of the decade. If that seems like an exaggeration, I invite you to recall what our norms were like before the Republican party was hijacked by Trump. Every day in the back half of the decade, it seemed like we collectively decided to get nastier, more bullying, more bizarrely detached from reality, more friendly to conspiracy theories and dictators, more racist, more hateful. I’ve said very little about politics to my children, hoping that there will be more decent people around when they’re old enough to remember. Even that seems like too much to hope for now. Now I’m just hoping that the results of the first election of the next decade will be respected if they don’t go the way the Republicans want. They’re locked together against a just impeachment. Does it seem outrageous to think they’d lock together to deny a just election?

So maybe I was too melancholy and pessimistic, and maybe I didn’t need to go looking for career opportunities in the summer of 2018. Anyway, I found one. Working at ABL might be the closest I’ll ever come to what I envisioned as my dream job in high school and college. I didn’t found the company, but I was one of the first couple dozen who worked there, and I got involved in a brand-new rocket in a way I’d never be able to at a more established company. It lasted while it lasted. Sarah and I were uprooted again by medicine, this time to Seattle. Geographically it was a good move, but the churn wears you out after a while. I hope the next decade will bring more stability.

I came full circle in my professional life at the end of the decade. I’m back at Blue, though the company, the industry, and I are transformed. SpaceX and Blue are both routinely recovering rockets from space. Blue Origin is vast compared to the startup-esque Vrigin and true startup of ABL. I started my new job, working the fluid systems of the second stage of New Glenn, feeling like this isn’t my first rodeo and I basically know how a rocket should go together. In June of 2015, at Virgin Galactic, I was a babe in the woods by comparison. After the long dry spell in US human spaceflight after the Space Shuttle’s retirement, I’m proud to be playing my little part in this renaissance.

Does that cover it? Of course not. If I had time to properly sketch this out I’m sure I’d lay things out differently and be more careful about my focus. Maybe I’d tell you something fun about the novel I’m writing. If enough people read this there will be those who are pissed off both by what I say and what I omit. Please know that I’m genuinely trying (sometimes more sincerely than other) to be good, to be kind, to be a vessel of whatever grace is left that put this universe into motion. I’m so tired of all the cruelty and unnecessary pain we dish out to each other. I just want to be helpful, to make something beautiful, to love and embrace my wife, to love and care for my children, to try to make something meaningful out of this chaos that we swim in. Was the last decade good or bad, satisfying or disappointing, full of growth or failure? I don’t know. All of that, I suppose. It was what it was. Maybe this isn’t the right set of questions. But asking questions seems like the right thing to do.

At the end of the next decade I’ll be 40. After the crucible of my 20s I hope I can use this time to do some good in this world. I hope you can do something like that too, wherever you are.