An old friend recently sent me a LinkedIn post that has been doing the rounds and getting a lot of traction among the space community. It was a story from someone lamenting that they had spent their entire career watching Falcon 9, Dragon, Falcon Heavy, and now potentially Starship happen while they sat on the sidelines at NASA for over 30 years.1
My first reaction (and my friend’s, too) was that it was a damn shame this guy sat idly by for nearly four decades and never jumped onboard. But the more I thought about it, that didn’t seem to tell the whole story. Lord knows jumping into a career at a New Space startup that runs on a continuous stream of people being hoovered in, ground up, and then spit out as bonemeal isn’t exactly a guaranteed path to a fulfilling life.
Indeed, I’ve watched many friends and peers be turned into dust this way before being cruelly jettisoned at speed from many of these VC backed space company companies as they barrel down the track towards their supposed glory. It’s unpleasant for them at best, and career ending at worst. For those of us who stay, it’s often more about one’s ability to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’ than anything else.2
So, I wasn’t sad because he sat at some desk job at NASA and made (presumably) a good salary for his entire career. He probably owned a home, raised a family, and then retired with a pension. That’s nothing to gripe about! Hell, that’s supposed to be the American Dream — and it’s one that’s increasingly out of reach for my generation. Many people my age would kill to know that they have three straight decades of steady salary and medical lined up. Plus, I know lots of people who are very fulfilled with their careers in and around the NASA sphere. I have buddies who have helped put rovers and helicopters on Mars for heaven’s sake. Nothing beats that!
So, what gives with that LinkedIn post?
Two Types of Knowing
There are two types of knowing, broadly speaking. There is knowing in the mind, and that’s most of what we deal with day to day. Then there is knowing in the body, which is what we might better call experience.
Brenee Brown has a great synopsis on the difference:
We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands… The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”
Mental knowing is the cheapest, because it’s really an illusion. It’s stuff like our opinions which, by and large, are as changeable as a spring breeze. Plus, even most of our so-called facts are generally based on conjecture and bias. The majority of what we think we know is simply the result of narrowing our aperture to provide the illusion of a controllable life.
Aka, we don’t know shit, and the sooner we all realize that the better life will be. Instead, many seem to be in a hurry for their proverbial clay to dry3 to more easily settle into a life of undisturbed comfort. Even my knowledge of engineering is being corrupted by the decay of my memory over time; I find myself returning to my textbooks more and more often.
But there’s that second kind of knowing, which is much more valuable. It’s the knowing that’s in our hearts, our guts, or even as deep as our bones. What’s the difference? It’s this simple:
You hear the stove is hot and you think, “Yeah, ok, got it.” Then you accidentally touch the stove. “God damn! The stove is hot!”
At the risk of giving blanket advice from the vantage of point of my mid (late) thirties, I think a lot of life is about being disabused of as much of the former mental knowing as possible, while racking up as much of the bodily knowing as we can.
You Might Not Actually Want That
Other than the SR-71 Blackbird, which was retired before my time, I think the A-10 Warthog is the baddest ass airplane on the planet. Tough, tactical, and immediately recognizable it checked all the boxes I wished I could check for myself in my teenage years. I remember telling my Dad, a bush pilot, how bad I wanted to fly them sometime around my senior year of high school, when the war in Iraq was happening.
“Do you want to go to the Middle East and shoot people?” he asked curiously.
“No!” I replied, horrified.
“Ok, well I don’t think they’re gonna let you just fly it around.”
That was the end of that dream.
I don’t think we talk about it, but that’s how a lot of life goes. Get an idea, try it out, note our reaction. We’re good at focusing on one element of a dream (or outright fantasy, frankly) and pretty bad at placing that element in the context of reality. In short, we suck at understanding what things would actually be like.
It was like that during the early days of the SpaceX barge. We had people constantly begging to come with us on mission. I’m talking grown-ups kneeling in a parking lot with their hands clasped. It was wild. But I couldn’t understand it. From my perspective, the missions were a ton of work and completely exhausting.
We usually spent around a week out at sea per mission. During that time, we were waiting on the launch pad, so we always had to be ready. There was no telling when they might scrub a mission or move a launch which extended out time at sea. All day we rocked out on the ocean fixing parts of the barge that broke down, getting tossed off the toilet by an errant wave, and staving off boredom. At night, we were racked and stacked in bunks on our small support vessel listening to the snores and flatulence of our coworkers.
At least once a mission, there would be a few hectic hours as we prepared for a rocket to come in for a landing, but just as often in those days we’d swing over the ropes between the boat and barge to shut everything back down again. Also in those days, when the rocket came it tended to explode on the deck which meant clean up duty once the fires subsided. If at any point you were seasick, you had to deal with it. If you didn’t bring the right gear you went without. If the weather turned (as it so often did) we hunkered down in misery until it passed.
Whenever I explained all this to whomever was asking, whether begging on their knees or over the phone4, invariably a change would come over them. This change happened at various points of my lecture, but by the end each person had been completely transformed. All of a sudden, the barge mission didn’t sound so good anymore.
Same goes for the 30-year NASA veteran, I’d wager. I don’t think he actually wanted a career at SpaceX or wherever else. What he was really lamenting, I think, was never getting the chance to know what it would have been like to be part of something like that. A weeklong internship would have cured the itch and provided all the bodily knowing required to return to his NASA desk with a deep and abiding gratitude.
But Still…
At some point, for something, the desire to find out must prevail over the fear of trying. Certainly not for everything. It is important to discern the false calls to adventure to ensure that we have the energy, space, and willpower to answer the true calls when they come. For most things, the first type of mental knowing is enough to pop the fantasy bubble and strike them off our list. But for the others, where our appetites are only whetted by hearing the complex reality of living them, we must push on.
There are those things that haunt us, that lie just over the horizon or just beyond our perception. We can feel them call to us, tugging on our hearts, in the moments when our jabbering minds quiet down. It is for those that we must take the risk to pursue true knowing, to relinquish the illusion of safety and comfort, and step into the unknown. That is the only way we might move true knowledge from our minds to become the unique experiences that live in our hearts.
I won’t link it here because I don’t feel like piling on the guy, and the specific post doesn’t matter anyway.
“The beatings will continue until morale improves” is the unofficial motto of most of these companies.
“You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.” (link)
I once conducted a phone interview with an engineer who wanted “more than anything” to be on the SpaceX barge project. I recall vividly that our interview was on a Sunday. He asked about work life balance, since not going over 40 hours a week was very important to him, and I said, “Well, it’s Sunday afternoon and we’re all crowded around a speaker phone at work talking to you, so…” That was the last we heard from him. I often thought of him as I cleaned up rocket scraps late at night or sat alone in the hotel room I lived in for a year. C’est la vie.