Closer to the Heart

I don’t remember everything that happened during my childhood, or even most of it. Nobody does after maturing and mutating into an adult. I think my memory is passable, though, and I vividly remember one of my favorite play activities as a child: Designing airplanes. I recall my dad sitting down with me when I was about five, and each of us sketched and colored a concept for an airplane that had never existed. One hit and I was hooked. After a few years, the bookshelves in my room were stuffed not just with books about airplanes, space, and nature, but with binderfuls of my colored pencil aeronautical dreams.

As I grew older my core interests evolved, but only a little. I watched every documentary and read every book about the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo eras I could find. By the time I was in high school I could tell you the crew and a synopsis for every American human spaceflight mission through the beginning of the Space Shuttle era (still can, by the way). I watched the scrappy upstarts vying for the X Prize with fascination, and I was introduced to the rocket equation and the idea of spaceflight on a reasonable budget by Robert Zubrin’s The Case for Mars. I felt I could leave my mark here, making space something more accessible for everyone, that it mattered, and that it was something I would enjoy doing.

This coming week will be my last one working at Blue Origin. Blue is the third place (after Virgin Orbit and ABL Space Systems) where I’ve worked in the space industry on the design of vehicles that move things into space. Before these gigs I designed test fixtures in the Boeing structures lab, an experience that gave me the onramp I needed to get into this business. I’m now walking away from the work that I’ve spent my educational and professional life angling toward. Some explanation is needed, or at least desirable.

What was it about engineering that so bewitched me? I loved (and continue to love) learning about the machines others make and how they work, but there’s another kind of magic in rolling your own. Thinking of the mission and the essentials that might get it done, how those requirements translate into metal and curves, nuts and bolts, leads to a buzz of creativity that’s difficult to crystallize into words. Genesis begins with a description of God’s creation of the universe, then states that humans are made in the image of God. If there’s truth in Genesis, maybe it’s this. In the creative process we fulfil ourselves and touch the face of God all at once.

Creativity exists in many forms. Why focus on machines? Trying to explain why I’ve focused here so far might be as fruitless as trying to explain why I score low on extraversion and high on openness when I take the Big Five personality test. It’s who I am. Seeing the way the parts of a machine, especially any mechanical system, fit together and function gives me a joy bordering on eros. I think many people feel some amount of this, some very little, and some feel it by the bucketful. Put me in the third category. Perhaps this is just my fundamental frequency.

It wasn’t passion alone that led me to this career path. Duty, or at least a perception of it, also played a role. I could imagine a future where space travel would be commonplace, where humans would be filling spaces and establishing life on worlds throughout the universe, and that did more than appeal to me. It seemed to me that if such a future is possible, making it happen is an imperative. I doubt I’ve ever had anything like a true religious experience, but this is the closest I’ve come with sober mind. I’ve come to realize that the evangelism of Earth’s biochemistry seems to be my natural religion.\

Obviously I have some work to do.

I still believe that gaining a toehold for life beyond Earth is something worth toiling for. The mistake I made growing up was assuming that it was that thing more worth toiling for than anything else, and therefore what I had to devote my entire life to. Whatever part of me believed that wasn’t in good communication with the rest of me, apparently. I quickly found other devotions. Relationships, for a start. Actual eros, which in its unaltered state leads directly to agape, the febrile devotion of parents to children. It’s difficult to take seriously the idea that any product made at work is “your baby” when you have one, or two, or three actual babies at home.

There’s a strange intersection between the work that people like me, motivated by passion and duty, are willing to do for organizations that largely exist to generate profit with the same totalitarian devotion. The private space companies, SpaceX the clear flagship among them, have made more progress toward a future where normal people get to space in the decade since the retirement of the Space Shuttle than NASA made in three decades of operating it. That’s great. What’s less great is the cost in human capital and human dignity. People line up, willing to give what’s needed to get the job done, and the companies are more than happy to extract.

On the upside, working on orbital launch vehicles has been thrilling, fulfilling, satisfying, exciting. What more could you ask for in a career? The downside is that I increasingly find my life out of balance, blurring together in the stress of it all like memories of a drunken night. That might be manageable if I could hold on to the creative flow that gives the work of the design engineer that upside, but I find this slipping my grasp, too. I’ve been good at my job. I’m valuable to my organization. The reward for that value is a push toward project and budget management, vendor haggling, and telling people what to draw. The workload goes up, and it’s less and less appetizing, and my children seem to need more from me every day.

Maybe it’s gauche for me to point to LauncherOne as an example of what I’ve done. I left the project 19 months before the first launch attempt. Is it reasonable to call any part of its ultimate success mine? That vehicle is not just mine, of course. Its design owes a debt to hundreds of people who cloned and grafted a little bit each of their elan into it. I’m one of those people, though, and seeing that rocket make its way all to orbit in January felt like closure of a sort to the dream. At this point, with the forward-looking difficulties I face, the prospect of doing this again and again for another few decades doesn’t excite me. It makes me want to puke.

As this year has progressed I’ve considered this in the context of my wife finishing her medical training. She initially looked only at post-fellowship jobs in the Seattle area, assuming that I’d stay at Blue. I urged her to be a bit more open-minded, and she found a wonderful position, an ideal one for her, in a small town in Oregon. That’s where we’ll be moving around a month after this writing. I’m presented, then, with an opportunity to figure out what comes next.

Consider again that creativity comes in many forms. As much as I appreciate and respect the nuances of engineering design, it’s the creative aspect of the craft that really makes me glow. The cookbook algebraic equations on heat transfer and structural load factors, not quite so much. Throughout my life I’ve appreciated literature, particularly at the intersection of science and technology that comes out in science fiction. I love the engagement of the imagination it brings, real-life telepathy, as Stephen King puts it. But I convinced myself, in my pseudo-puritanical fashion, that a focus on practical quantifiable engineering was a clearer fulfillment of my duty on Earth to create than is the writing that I enjoy.

Overcoming this implicit bias turned out to be easy. Should the world have good stories, good books, good writing? If the answer is affirmative, then refocusing my efforts, at least for the time being, on writing makes sense.

I’ve tried this on for size over the last couple of years, with increasing seriousness in the last few months. My writing output has been meager so far, but it hasn't been zero, in spite of everything else competing for attention. I expect my output to grow substantially after we cross the Columbia. I have no idea if this will be a successful transition. But it’s one I’m interested in trying, and one that I have an opportunity to try.

Passion, interest, opportunity, balance. I don’t know for sure if life will be beautiful at the intersection of those four, but it’s certainly worth a shot.