The Xperience
A spaceship engineer’s tale.
Sparks fly and forklifts beep at 2am, and Joe moves quickly past, head down, urgently attending to a welling flood of tasks that never decreases, never gets easier. Sweating in the late night heat of the south Texas swamp, he shuffles across the weather-dampened concrete of the rocket primary structures production tent, passing speakers that blast rock, mariachi, and EDM in an echoing, electronically saturated chorus that fills the space to overflowing.
Supercomputers across the globe churn away at the finite element models he submitted to the queue an hour ago. Even the company’s massive parallel cluster of CPUs is limited in the number of calculations it can compress into every second, so the jobs from every engineer and analyst each receive a priority-based ration from the server banks according to the QoS (Quality of Service) rules. Ever-advancing structural, fluid, and thermal simulations pile onto the cluster, always increasing demand for teraflops and terabytes. Warm plumes constantly dissipate as air conditioning condensers at the company’s multitude of data centers emit the worldwide thermal signature of the hopeful advance of a species by way of hot silicon.
He hurries past the foundry. The vacuum furnace gapes and discharges glowing turbopump castings in rippling waves of superheated air. Joe arrives at the tent’s hangar door but stops short as a tracked crane roars slowly across his path, suspending from its boom a shining stainless steel rocket section nine meters in diameter, swinging like a ship in a slow swell as it heads to its next manufacturing cell. Joe jogs around a corner in the dark, and passes the shadowy forms of fellow techs and engineers that exchange nods or shouts of excitement as he hurries past. He makes brief stops at the bathroom and breakroom. From a warm plastic box he forks sustenance without bothering to notice its taste. Joe and most of the others know they aren’t quite making the minimum contribution to biological necessity, but with bloodshot eyes they force themselves to continue working regardless.
The week, the month, the quarter have been a flow of activity like a stormy gale, with random surges that keep him up for twenty, thirty, forty hours straight. The river of tasks inundating the organization comes in streams of meetings attended by a few, a dozen, or a hundred of the world’s best: here’s how we’ll fly, here’s our hope for the system, here’s a sudden change of plan from our crazed genius founder. Bad news, good news — heartrates and blood pressures rise either way. The chronology leading to the present is tangled in most of their minds, but the team presses on, always attempting to accelerate. Design reviews conducted in hallways scattered with rocket parts, in huddles around glowing flat screens, and in video calls during commutes both ways in the streaks of headlights and taillights have shaped the extreme machines growing in the production tent.
Squinting in the bright lights, Joe arrives at his table in the row of temporary office trailers behind the production tents. The supercomputer is done. Joe draws a breath as he downloads the results to the Texas swamp, fighting a rush of adrenaline.
The hundreds of hours leading to this moment flash: charter and commercial flights between sites, stays in camping trailers among the mosquitoes, frogs, and crabs of the country’s southernmost extremity, lightning dancing, sparks flying, and hammers smashing to align rocket barrel sections, deafening. Five-signature peer reviews, redesigns, re-reviews, then finally approvals and parts release. Requests For Quotes, Requests For Parts, Requests For Purchase Orders — all in parallel while the team scrambles to refine the analysis models. Forklifts, pallets, and box cutters — parts arrive, barcode stickers print in ribbons and fall like snow to stick on cardboard and plastic baggies. Inventory throbs like a lung, inhaling check-ins and exhaling checkouts. Fluid transfer tubes, wire harnesses, and actuators arrive and immediately depart for installation. Sparks fly. A row of machines under construction aims skyward, but will they succeed? No answer yet — the analyses are still running, far too late.
Joe blinks. A rainbow of colors paints his on-screen subsystem, an uncaring coloration showing the stresses estimated by the supercomputer cluster. Joe tweaks the scales and the color shifts. Blue for unstressed metal, advancing through green, yellow, orange, and finally red for anything beyond the ultimate stress at which the material ruptures. The ideal design would light up entirely in orange — not a bit of material wasted, everything stressed to just below the maximum allowable: the lightest structure that can barely do the job. But this stress rainbow is only part of the story. What about buckling, thermal, vibrational, aerodynamic, optical, electrical, radio frequency, or chemical effects? Use cases, fabrication and installation processes — they try to plan and check everything, but worryingly late in the process. The rocket is already moving to the pad, on a forced schedule that is always just a bit more compressed than is reasonable, or even possible. Will all of the analyses arrive in time? Will they predict success or disaster? Joe does a quick final calc, and double-checks. Finally he exhales, not realizing that he’s been holding his breath. Weeks of analyses predict that this part of the monster will survive to orbit, and back again.
Sparks fly. The schedule presses Joe and the others like a vice. Cryogenic oxygen and methane gush through tubes that welders crawled through just hours before. Frigid, heavy fog cascades down the ship and across concrete, dirt, and reeds. An evacuation, a countdown. An abort and many shrugs.
Back to work. For hours, days, weeks? In this blur of bodies and minds pushed to extremes, who’s counting?
Another evacuation and countdown pause the swelling onslaught of work. Breaths quicken for some and pause for others. 3–2–1: a sequence of decisions designed in months but made within a handful of computer clock ticks commands valves and actuators to engage, and turbines and chilled impellers accelerate in milliseconds. Waves of combustion traverse chambers of pressurized swirling fuel and oxygen. The flow chokes at the nozzle throat — worrisome words elsewhere but nominal in rockets. Combustion products accelerate down bell nozzles, forced by optimized area ratios to accelerate at hundreds of gravities. Nozzle exit pressures fall below ambient, and the violent atmospheric impact stretches a row of glimmering shock diamonds down into the thrust plumes. Engines load and deflect structures, latches and quick-disconnects release as the thrust to weight ratio grows beyond unity, and the monster pushes itself skyward on dozens of columns of supersonic superheated gas. A cascade of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water ices shed from trembling metal skins entrain in the flaming flow and blast the pad’s hardened shielding.
Startled wildlife race away on limbs grown from a billion years of natural selection, the columns of downward flowing flames yet an additional set of limbs on that same march of evolution. The rising pressurized fuel tank on fire lifts a payload that is a mere fraction of the total mass rising through the atmospheric strata. At Max-Q a white vapor shockwave blinks around the nosecone. Throttles up, then steadily down as the tanks drain. Main engine cut-off. Stage separation. Machines dance in formation. The booster turns for home and the Ship rides to orbit atop a ballooning column of adiabatic expansion, hypersonic gases rarifying from hot to cold in the vacuum above the Karman line. With the crowd Joe cheers and sheds tears of suffering, failure, hardship, stress, cancelation, relief, and success.
Silence returns to the pad and the next day sparks fly, building the next chapter of a quest that never ends.
Resumes pile up, thousands wanting to join the mission, from crackpots and hacks to humanity’s brightest minds. We can always get the best, most especially the young, energetic, and talented. There is no purer — or crueler — playground for scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, analysts, and geeks. A few truncated web classes of new hire orientation, and then it’s into the hot pan. And then into the coals. Scramble to learn every application and process, and deliver on schedule even as it squeezes left. Your peers are all too strained for spoon-feeding. They offer a few sentences of instruction and advice, and you figure out the rest in the midst of battle. All strive to excel, and those who were the best elsewhere barely survive here. Struggle and strain to hold up your end while everyone else does the same. And bend but don’t snap when a tweet from the top changes everything.
How long can I go on? It’s a question Joe knows is on everyone’s mind. The sprint isn’t sustainable. Turnover is constant and everyone thinks about it. Three years is a long time. Anyone past five is an old-timer.
The costs of this frantic race accumulate. Hand over those long walks on the beach, weekend barbecues, and flashing lights at the club. Pay by giving up fishing trips and remodel plans. Now dig deeper, give up the hours. Hobbies? Work on rockets and space is your every hobby now. Visits and phone calls to friends and relatives separate across the months, then cease. Now come up with even more. Pets get ten minutes per day, and then a minute per ten days. Meals and ingredients rot in the fridge. And when the fridge goes out, that goes unnoticed, too.
Girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, and children don’t happen; divorces and breakups do. Those losses are replaced by friendships built entirely from lives spent at work. Do you even know these people? What are they like outside of work? But there is no outside of work. We do know each other, more intimately than we realize, because this is all we do, and we do it together.
Perhaps by design, no one has time to wonder if this is really the best way to do it. We press ahead by barely maintaining a small, embattled cavalry that struggles forward, constantly consuming and then shedding a worn-out wake of the world’s best talent. Riding on the charisma of the company and its manic founder, we attack the mission with half the people, working four times as hard, to deliver twice the result. Does this make us more efficient than our competitors?
That depends on what we’re measuring.
In a sudden decision that’s been welling in his subconscious, Joe clicks send. The draft resignation letter that had been waiting deep in his email appears in inboxes across the ranks. It’s an email they receive with regularity, and the two-week process is practiced and seamless. Just as often, the organization itself chooses to lop off engineers, planners, and technicians — to keep the flock desperately thin and reallocate the dollars, shares, and assets listed in some spreadsheet emotionlessly employed from the top. His load will spread to his beleaguered colleagues, just as he had taken the load from those that left before him. His last day comes, and weary souls he’s befriended during his time glance up from their screens to smile briefly and say good luck and goodbye, and wonder how it will feel when their turn comes.
With a strange twinge of sadness Joe reconnects to the life he had put on hold — relationships rekindled, finances organized, cluttered belongings dusted, sorted, and arranged. It is a pleasant and leisurely remembrance, a rejoining with the world of what normal people do, and a reacquaintance with sensations that had numbed during his time in the company’s maelstrom.
He often revisits the crazed crush of experience he had there, and re-does his mental accounting, trying to decide if it was worth it. As he strolls beneath the night sky among the crickets, he watches small lines of satellites move across the sky, knowing he helped, just a little, to put them up there. Did the contribution he made during his short time at the company help push us on our multi-billion year struggle to survive, develop, and grow? He hopes so, and that we are all first-hand witnesses, right now, of the nascent germination of Earth’s life forever into the stars.
Based on a true story.
