If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.

-Sheryl Sandberg

So I’m a young engineer. I specialise in electric vehicles and robotics. Hardware, be it electronics or mechanical, I’ll put it together and make it work. I’ve got a super-technical outlook on things - always calculated, double checked.

But the thing I can’t get my head around is how I got to where I’m at in life. I promised in my first post I’d say a bit about myself this time. Right now, I’m getting paid to design my own app in a country I’ve never been. I never considered myself a traveller, and app-design is way outside my field of engineering but I took a gamble and so far so good.

Not gonna lie, it was an all-in bet. You know that situation where you’ve just finished your degree, got yourself a house in the city and a sweet-ass ole-school luxury car, and someone wants to take you away from all that to build your own crazy neo-Snapchat kind of app idea? Well yeah, I’m in that point in my life where that just happened to me.

Somebody offered me a seat on a rocket ship and I didn’t hesitate, I just got on. So the past weeks I’ve been in proverbial astronaut training, but time will tell if I make it off the launch pad. To be honest I’m the one looking around the ship during the safety briefing, inspecting the rivets around the windows as any engineer would. The rest of the crew are learning the safe operation of a life-raft when the operation-of-life-raft is the least (or in the bottom 10%) of my worries.

In my engineering opinion (I did some calcs), this ship is held together by the exact number of rivets it needs — minus one.

That’s how this engineer might describe how nervous he is. On launch day I’m going to need to trust that someone else counted all the fasteners on this ship, because I’m so busy I won’t find the time between my daily psych assessments and high intensity stress preparedness classes to do the inspections myself.

In my other life I’m celebrating what could be, the last time I get to do this kind of thing. Obviously, I’m dramatising. After all, if this falls through in the real world my worst case scenario doesn’t actually prevent me from starting another start-up. But while I’m in the moment, having a beer after a good day in the spaceman centrifuge machine, the gravity of this lifestyle is very real.

I’ve already learned some shit that nobody would ever find out about themselves. You might have thought that someone who’s middle name is ‘Danger’ might know everything there is to know about taking risks; I’ve done both firefighting and vertical rescue according to my LinkedIn profile.

But I guess nothing can prepare you for spaceman school. It’s like getting handed everything you’ve ever needed, on the premise you’d be lucky to still want to live by the time you’re done. They put you through some crazy, stressful shit.

I told all my friends I’m going to space. They asked me which seat, I said I didn’t ask. I joke, maybe they’ll let me sit on the outside next to the boosters. Hahaha. Conversation fades. I honestly don’t know what I’m doing, where we’re going. If I’ll be the same when I get back.

Outer space is a big enough mission to get me excited, but Yogi Berra once said if you don’t know where you’re going you might wind up some place else. I think the gravity of his quote is pretty different when applied to outer space.

That’s my second gravity pun and for that I apologise! I needed to lighten up the situation. I don’t really know any better, and my only other creative outlet is through my endeavours as a musician. I might talk about that later if it comes up again. But in space, no-one can hear you drum so I’ll save it for another time.

So to sum up, I got offered a seat on a rocket ship and they reckon I can be a spaceman. I’m super scared of what could happen, but as John Wayne put it: ‘Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.’ And even though I don’t actually know what happens at the end of that movie I’m gonna stick with it. It’s fitting if I look at it as a scene of my own life-movie that’s yet unfinished.

Knowing you’re on the way to some out-of-this-world app idea is like a dream come true, but that same kind of dream that causes you to grind your teeth so hard your roommate wakes you up.

I think it’s obvious I couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this, but I pay the price in ups and downs.