Responsible & Lead Engineer at Vandenberg SLC-4E
TL;DR
I joined SpaceX in 2012 straight out of graduate school as a “Responsible Engineer” in charge of the ground TVC (thrust vector control) and acoustic water systems.
By the time I left two years later, I was the Lead Engineer, having led the field team in preparing the Falcon 9 for launch on the pad; the leader of the Red Team, a small team of technicians in charge of fixing any issues during the launch campaign; as well as responsible engineer for a handful more ground systems including RP-1 fuel and high-pressure nitrogen.
Project Quote
“It’s incredible to me how blithely even intelligent people sometimes toss around terms like “transcendence.” The words move us on paper. They feel noble upon the tongue. But when they cease to be sounds and begin to caress the flesh and bones, when they leave the page and get physical, there is little that even the best of us wouldn’t do to escape them.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K
The Parking Lot
The story of how I ended up at SpaceX in the first place is a long and wild one. However, even more memorable than how I got there was my first day on the launch pad as a newly minted “responsible engineer.” What did that mean? In short, my cohort and I were fully responsible from turning an old parking lot with giant hole in the middle into a world-class launch site.
I was tasked with designing, building, testing, and commissioning both the acoustic water and ground thrust vector control systems. We were told specifically that it didn’t matter if weather, a meteor, or even good old-fashioned sabotage caused our systems to not be ready on time, we would be held responsible.
Construction Site to Launch Pad
The transition from construction to launch was very fluid and there was plenty of overlap. That meant that in addition to finishing the design and test of my pad systems, I was also regularly leading operations such as rolling a white rocket on a white transporter through a quarter mile of dense white fog to the launch pad for fit up and, eventually, wet dress rehearsal. This meant long days and even longer nights as we ground closer to our first launch.
Figuring Things Out
We had to figure a lot of things out on the fly, such as whether or not this one-million-pound trolley (called the Transporter Erector) would make it down our brand-new road to the launch pad.
This photo is from the first time we ever rolled it out of the hangar, checking to see if the large aircraft tires would skid around corners.
I became involved in operations such as these regularly, which led to me being named Lead Engineer for the launch campaign.
Launch of Vandy Flight 1
Through a challenging campaign that included everything from The Great LOX Boil off of 2013 to light drama with the Air Force threatening to shut us down, our team persevered to launch.
As our site director always told us, “No one remembers when you launch, only the result.”
He was right. No one remembers that we were supposed to launch a Falcon Heavy in November of 2012 (which, in our defense, the rocket didn’t even exist). They only remember that we successfully launched the first Falcon 9 v1.1 in September of 2013.
Transcendence
I came into this project fresh out of grad school and ready to take on the world. I wanted to transform from a greenhorn kid into a real launch veteran. It happened, and the cost was high. It felt a lot like turning from a caterpillar into a butterfly, but not in some abstract, sentimental, heartwarming way.
No, it felt very much like that isolated launch pad on the south end of Vandenberg Air Force Base was my cocoon, and that inside it I was wholly digested — completely broken down to my constituent elements and reassembled — as we learned to build, test, and then operate our new pad through 18-months of non-stop sprinting toward our launch goal. After the rocket lifted into the first clear blue sky we’d seen in weeks, I emerged from my own fog as an entirely new creature, and one that didn’t resemble the original form in any way.
Through 17-hour shifts, and endless weeks where we lost track of the day and simply declared that “every day was Wednesday,” I had metamorphosized into something new — a wily Pad Rat, something a bit like Rat Fink on a bender crossed with a mad thermodynamicist — my version of a beautiful butterfly.
Welcome to Vandy SLC-4E. Modeling by Chris Newton.
It looked like a parking lot, with a giant portal to Hell at the center. Our job was simple: build everything (the hardware, operations, and expertise) that would let a rocket sit over that portal and launch to space.
The hangar is under construction. We really started over from the beginning. The road to connect this hangar to the pad was cut through a hillside.
The hangar team welded together around a million pounds of steel into a trolley called the Transporter Erector.
We were mostly youngins, but we had a few critical 'graybeards' like Dick Gill who had run rigs in the desert of the Middle East, helped build the Alaska Pipeline, and then launched rockets for our competitor. He knew how to do more with less.
Fuel tanks arriving on site.
On Instagram, things always look put together. Our team was in the fog and the dirt making the proverbial sausage everyday.
One day, our construction site turned abruptly into a launch site.
Taken the morning of launch. I led the Red Team, a small group of technicians responsible for final config of the pad before launch.