The Impossible Drive and Work Life Balance - Peter Dohm

Show Notes

An interview with entrepreneur Peter Dohm about his trajectory from college, to SpaceX and onward to Prime Lightworks and the LA Curling Center.

What is It's Not Rocket Science?

A podcast exploring the life arcs of smart, creative, driven people who helped Elon Musk and SpaceX revolutionize the space industry. How did they get there? What was it like? What world are they creating now?

Jeff: 00:04

What I really want you to know is that this podcast is called It's Not Rocket Science, and it's an exploration of what people do after they've already had the coolest job on the planet. That is, after they've already worked at SpaceX. My name is Jeff Ward. I worked at SpaceX for about three and a half years as a vice president of avionics, and while I was there, I met a lot of very, very smart, cool people.

Jeff: 00:26

And what we're going to explore during these interviews is what those people are doing now, and and a little bit of the background of how they got to SpaceX, what they did there, and how SpaceX shaped them. We have liftoff. Have liftoff. The first person who agreed to participate in my experiment is my good friend and colleague Peter Dome, who I worked with at SpaceX and Millennium Space Systems.

Peter: 00:45

I'm an RF engineer. I do communication links. Currently, I'm working on an electric propulsion project with a company called Prime Lightworks. We're a small two person company out of Torrance, California doing novel electric propulsion and trying to get our prototype up and working and getting test results and going from there.

Jeff: 01:02

So I'm going to stop right there and say that I think one of the challenges of this podcast is going to be terminology. Pete is a communications engineer. He builds radios. Except now he's working for a company that builds propulsion systems, which are the systems that let you move things around in space. So what I want to know, Pete, is how does being a radio guy turn you into a propulsion guy?

Peter: 01:22

Coming from SpaceX, I had my communications background, my radio frequency background, and, a lot of the electric propulsion is radio frequency based, actually. So I'm using my knowledge of building radios and doing that sort of stuff and turning that into an electronics box to, optimize a satellite propulsion system, essentially.

Jeff: 01:42

So what's cool about the Prime Lightworks prop system?

Peter: 01:46

Yeah. So it's based on an what's called an RF cavity thruster. So, basically, using, radio waves, we're able to feed a a hollow cavity and basically make a, a pressure differential, And that pressure differential makes a, thrust on one side more than the other, which allows it to go slow but accelerates at an infinite pace, if you will. This does not have fuel. It just uses radio waves, which uses electricity, which comes from a solar panel or batteries.

Jeff: 02:12

As near as I can make out, Pete's talking about taking your microwave oven, plugging it into some solar panels and using it to move a spaceship.

Peter Dohm: 02:19

Well, funny enough, that's how we started with this. We went and bought five microwave ovens from Target because they have the magnetrons that people were using originally to do this proof of concept.

Peter: 02:35

We're able to take away a consumable fuel and use a use a renewable source such as solar electric power and produce continuous thrust over a long period of time.

Jeff: 02:46

When I looked up RF cavity thrusters on Wikipedia, I found that they're referred to as the impossible drive. So I asked Pete if they're planning to violate any laws of physics.

Peter: 02:55

Not that we know of. We've we've done our full modeling. We've done our full first principles calculations. Everything seems to be fine. We have a patent pending, and we're hoping to publish soon all of our test results, our theory, and everything else to show that this doesn't break any laws of physics and that it really, really works.

Peter: 03:14

So it'd be a big breakthrough, and we hope that we can show this in the near future.

Jeff: 03:18

So in spite of the name of the podcast, I really can say that I interviewed a rocket scientist.

Peter: 03:24

I don't know if I was ever a rocket scientist. I've been a communications engineer masquerading as one. Like I said, I started off at SpaceX as an intern when I was 19. I stayed at SpaceX for a little while, and then I jumped over to a company called Millennium Space Systems. I took a little time to try a PhD at UCLA and ended up reconnecting with another SpaceX alumni and started this company, Prime Lightworks, in 2016.

Jeff: 03:48

After four years, does Prime Lightworks still seem like a start up to you?

Peter: 03:52

Oh, it's definitely it definitely feels like a start up, you know, especially with only two people. We're doing everything in terms of, you know, accounting, insurance, HR, you know, accounts receivable, legal, and then we do the engineering part of it. So there's always something to do. I mean, there's always, you know, maintenance in the building that needs to be done, a toilet that needs to be fixed, fire extinguishers that need to be updated. You know, it never ends at when you're a small company, I don't think it ever it ever stops feeling like a startup, unfortunately.

Jeff: 04:19

How did the company get started?

Peter: 04:21

The founder, Kyle Flanagan, he started the company in 2016. He's a SpaceX alumni as well, and he applied for Y Combinator 2016. He was accepted and went through the full Y Combinator program, and that, you know, leads to more connections and more, more opportunities, and that leads to the funding and greater things to get us through the design prototype, you know, paying for all the elaborate test equipment and everything else. So it definitely started, you know, it starts like every other startup with a dream and an idea and someone to push it through.

Jeff: 04:54

It does sound like this company owes some of its origin to SpaceX.

Peter: 04:58

Definitely. I would say SpaceX has definitely permeated through all of the work that I've done since then.

Jeff: 05:03

So jumping back a bit, how did you end up at SpaceX?

Peter: 05:06

Really with the with the radio frequency degree, you can only do two things. You can do cell phones or satellites, and cell phones didn't really interest me. There's the whole aerospace area of Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon, Aerospace Corporation, all in the South Bay. So I applied to all those big companies, but I ended up looking around for other companies in the area, and I saw a company, in El Segundo that, you know, was a small company back in the day that was called Space Exploration Technologies. They looked interesting.

Peter: 05:36

I honestly hadn't heard of them at the point. You know, looked them up. I sent my resume, and within a couple days, I got a a call from my mentor, at that point, and he said, you know, let's bring you in, and, the rest is history. You know, I I came into SpaceX right as they moved into the, the Hawthorne plant. There's a big pit in the middle of the of the reception area as they were trying to pour new concrete foundations, that sort of stuff.

Jeff: 06:01

So you walked into this SpaceX construction site and what was the interview process like?

Peter: 06:05

The process was intense. I will say that it was five thirty minute interviews with, different people at SpaceX. They put me in in front of successively more important people, it seems like, and kept on grilling me and grilling me about, you know, what I know, how I can make things work. You know, one of them pulled out a ham radio that he had on desk and said, could you make this work? I think I made a good impression enough to, be able to get an internship and, work as hard as I could from there.

Jeff: 06:33

I like the way you just throw out the phrase as hard as I could.

Peter: 06:36

My first summer was hard to say at least, adjusting to the speed of it and also trying to learn, you know, what school didn't tell me. Going from the academic environment to the practical was tough for me and and learning that. I mean, I felt I was on the edge of not being brought back, at times because I didn't think my work was up to par. And, you know, it was long hours, especially during those days. It was, you know, sixty hours, eighty hours a week even as intern because it was, you know, the Falcon one days.

Peter: 07:05

I remember I came in right at Falcon one flight three, and, we know how that one ended.

Jeff: 07:10

I have no trouble remembering what happened on flight three, but I watched it again on YouTube after talking to Pete. The video I chose just had the audio collected by the rocket's onboard microphones, and after a perfect first stage flight and separation of the two stages, you can hear a puff and a crunch as a tiny jet of gas pushes the first stage into the second stage, the video goes black. I for sure thought that SpaceX could go out of business that week after the third successive failure.

Peter: 07:38

And I remember the next day, Elon got up at an all hands meeting and said, you know, we're gonna go full steam ahead and make the next flight as good as possible. And three, four months later that happened and, there was the first successful Falcon one flight that I was there for and, you know, that that just showed me that the company was was trying to do the impossible and trying to do it as best they could.

Jeff: 08:00

A great start to your internship.

Peter: 08:01

Yeah. Definitely. Among many SpaceX moments. But that's kind of my earliest memory of SpaceX was, you know, watching watching the launch there and then the next day being able to see this man who has a vision say, look. We're not gonna shut shop just because we've had some failures.

Peter: 08:19

We're gonna continue to press on and, you know, no matter what, we're gonna make this work. And that kind of, you know, instilled in me that, you know, we can make anything happen as long as we keep on trying.

Jeff: 08:28

Which you did.

Peter: 08:29

Yeah. Definitely. I mean, we we did a lot of things that people said were impossible. You know, we launched a private rocket. We launched a nine engine private rocket.

Peter: 08:37

We made a capsule that docks with the International Space Station. You know, these are things that only governments had done. You know, I think only five governments had done in the past.

Jeff: 08:45

What do you think was the most impossible thing you saw in your time at SpaceX?

Peter: 08:49

You remember there's the Grasshopper program.

Jeff: 08:52

Grasshopper was the test for what became the self landing reusable rocket.

Peter: 08:56

And I remember being pulled into a meeting, for that, and someone basically goes up and says, you know, look, guys. We're going to, try and land a rocket. And I remember him pulling a marker from a dry erase marker from the whiteboard and and go to the desk and says, you know how rockets go up, up, and up? He puts the marker up in the up in the air, and he goes, look, guys. We're gonna stop here and then bring it down, down, down like he, does with his hand and puts it back on the desk and stands it straight up.

Peter: 09:24

And we look at him and go, you're crazy. There's no way this can happen. You know, nine, twelve months later, it happened.

Jeff: 09:32

Watching Elon's blooper reel on YouTube, you can see how much perseverance it took to create the reusable first stage. Grasshopper is self destructed in midair, stages land in the ocean, stages skitter across the decks of drone ships, topple and explode. It gives you a sense of why this had never been done before outside of science fiction novels.

Peter: 09:50

Something that was deemed literally impossible, reusing a rocket, getting it to land on itself, was able to be done by, you know, this group of people that are just amazingly talented and aren't willing to push the boundary.

Jeff: 10:04

So how did it affect you to work in an environment where every day you were expected to do the impossible?

Peter: 10:10

The stress of that place affects everyone differently. You know, I wasn't aware of at the time how I was coping with it. It was a lot of stress that I wasn't able to actually handle. It definitely led to personal problems in my own life that, you know, later on manifested itself. And, you know, I could look back and say the way I coped with stuff at SpaceX was definitely not healthy.

Peter: 10:33

And, and and I could pinpoint examples from there and say, this is what I should have done, but this is what I did. I ended up being a very heavy alcoholic at that point, you know, and part of it was the culture at the time. You know, we we like to play hard and, you know, party even harder. Seemed like, You know, I used to I used to have a bottle of vodka at my desk just for for certain occasions. I didn't handle the stress well, and that was one of the ways that I that I handled it was either through food or through drink.

Peter: 11:05

You know, I ended up gaining about 25 pounds at SpaceX just because I was stress eating. I didn't have time to work out, and then at night you know I'd go home instead of working out I would go and have a beer or have something else and you know one turns into two, two turns into three, and next thing you know that was my coping mechanism was, you know, to eat my feelings away and drink my feelings away.

Jeff: 11:27

As your VP at that time, I always saw it as kind of a work hard, play hard environment, and it wasn't obvious what the toll was on people in their personal lives. Did it take you getting away from SpaceX to really get straightened out?

Peter: 11:40

We always joke that, you know, people get instantly healthy once they leave SpaceX. You know, one of the people that we know, we joke that he regained his hair and he got his eyesight back. But definitely, once I was able to take a step back, everything started to get clear for me in terms of, you know, things not being normal, if you will. I had to address issues with with drinking. I had to, you know, be able to be honest with myself and say, look, I have a problem.

Peter: 12:07

And even at that point when I moved to my next job at Millennium Space Systems, I saw those old habits coming back at a point it just you know it breaks you down and you get to a point where you hit your your rock bottom and you say I can't do this anymore and then you know I ended up going through rehab actually to address issues you know, personal, emotional, physical, substance abuse, that sort of stuff, and be able to get myself back on a on a right path that I didn't realize I was even on, because everything else was was just so stressful that I wasn't thinking about myself. I was thinking about the company at that point.

Jeff: 12:45

Do you think you would have been able to straighten out if you had stayed at SpaceX?

Peter: 12:48

Oh, absolutely not. I don't I wasn't aware of myself at all when I was at SpaceX. I definitely if I was at SpaceX right now, I I probably wouldn't have figured it out still. Part of me likes to think that maybe I would have or maybe I would have got a a breaking point eventually, but, honestly, it did take some time to step back and say, look. This is not healthy, and this was why it's not healthy.

Peter: 13:10

And and being able to address it and taking yourself out of the situation is really the best way to do it. When I left SpaceX, it was kind of the the best, idea at that point for me.

Jeff: 13:21

But it does sound like the SpaceX experience gave you the tools for what you're doing now.

Peter: 13:25

Oh, definitely. I mean, that was six years ago and that has definitely, affected me in a day to day life in terms of, you know, just personally being able to understand how better how better to cope with issues. You know working at a startup is not not easy and you know being able to handle that stress in a more productive way and a more healthy way is a is a lot better than doing what I was doing. And, you know, it's it's the life lesson that I needed at that point.

Jeff: 13:55

Yeah, you work in a two man startup, and that has to be stressful. What do you do with your stress now?

Peter: 13:59

You know, I put I put company before self for a long time. And that was the wrong thing. You should put yourself before a company, because at the end of the day having yourself healthy makes a company work a lot better than you not being healthy. And being able to just take stock every day and say, look, it's stressful today. Tomorrow is going to be better, or, you know, next week will be better.

Peter: 14:22

There's a there's a definite end to this at the end of the day. Being able to understand that and see that and kind of parse that into a bigger picture as opposed to being in the weeds so much that I I used to be is is very, very helpful for me. You know, having a support system as well. My only support system when I was at SpaceX was other SpaceX engineers. We would rely on each other at SpaceX, which was great, but you don't really get that outside perspective because we're all in the same boat together.

Peter: 14:50

We're all in the same stress together. We are all trying to push the same way, and there wasn't an outside force saying, you know, look, this isn't what normal people do. Having that outside support system is definitely something I try and tap into as much as I can.

Jeff: 15:04

A lot of people would say that having a balanced life is not compatible with being in a startup business. Do you think you can do what you're describing and still be in a successful startup?

Peter: 15:13

Yeah. I definitely think so. The the startup life is definitely a stressful life. But knowing that at the end of the day, there's really only two ways that that it's gonna go. It's either gonna be successful or it's gonna fail, to to be blunt about it.

Peter: 15:27

And there's only so much that you can do. Know, if you work real hard, it could go either way. And, you know, I can stress myself out as much as I want about it, but I know either one of those two options are going to happen no matter how hard I work. My other partner in this company is an ex SpaceX person as well, and we adopted from day one. You know, we didn't want to beat a SpaceX sort of work style.

Peter: 15:49

We want to at least be able to have some sort of balance in our life.

Jeff: 15:52

And it sounds like your hard experiences at SpaceX have shaped your philosophy for prime light works.

Peter: 15:58

Definitely. Knowing that there's more to life than just the startup companies. You know, I used to be defined as a SpaceX engineer for a good portion of my life because that's all I did. You know, now I'm I'm a lot of other things that define me as well.

Jeff: 16:11

You saying that there are these other facets of your life makes me think of a question I want to ask on this podcast, but it's totally crass and you don't really have to answer it. But I know that as an early SpaceX employee, you had share options and that you must have made some money, and I wanna know what you did with it.

Peter: 16:26

Yeah. I mean, I I split up my money from SpaceX in four different ways. The first one was taxes, obviously. The second one, I reinvested into the startup, actually. The third one, I've made some investments to keep growing my money.

Peter: 16:41

And then the fourth one, I actually am working on another venture right now. I'm opening up a a curling center in Los Angeles. A what? A curling center. So the the sport of curling, if you see it in the, in the Olympics, in the Winter Olympics, the guys on the ice with the brooms and the rocks.

Peter: 16:58

I'm actually starting up a a curling center with a local curling club in the area. So I'm I'm branching out into sort of a a different area that, you know, gives me enjoyment, but also, lets me have something else in my life.

Jeff: 17:11

So how the heck did a kid from Culver City get into curling?

Peter: 17:15

It really is, don't wanna say, an engineer's game, but it's a it's a math game, if you will. It's a it's a game of angles. It's a game of precision. It's it's like billiards, but it's on a big sheet of ice. And the curling culture really sucked me in, and that's kind of has become part of my outside support structure that I was talking about.

Peter: 17:34

And then I saw that the local curling club, Hollywood Curling in the area, is looking to have a dedicated, facility. So I ended up looking at the numbers, and it kind of made sense that, you know, there's a business plan that could be made here, and we're going full steam ahead into building a center, in the city of Los Angeles and the city of Vernon actually. It's still a need that people want and people are are willing to to get behind. So coming back to the original question, diversify what I did from SpaceX into other things that I love. It's definitely been a great thing.

Jeff: 18:06

So somewhere in LA, there's a curling center because a guy got an internship at SpaceX. That's the kind of story that I anticipated finding in these interviews. Right now, we're all locked in our houses because of COVID-nineteen. What do you think it's going to be like when we get out and get into the new normal? Is it going to include curling?

Peter: 18:24

I mean, we joke that as a startup of two people, we've been basically in quarantine for a long time. I mean, nothing's really changed for me. I think the new normal will I hope be coming back to the old normal, but with a lot more hand washing now that people know how to actually wash their hands.

Jeff: 18:39

Yeah, that's a pragmatic answer, an engineer's answer. You know another question I want to ask everybody who comes on to this podcast is who do you wanna hear me interview and why do you wanna hear them?

Peter: 18:49

There's a bunch of old timers that are that have definitely gone on to do interesting things with their life. People like Casey Schilling, Aaron Gatling that have made an adventure out of their post SpaceX life. There's also people like Buell and Boulton that, you know, has lived an interesting life before SpaceX and an interesting life after SpaceX. People like Tina that has kind of transferred from that stressful life to kind of a more family life, it looks like, and a bunch of characters from the old days that can tell a good SpaceX story, but also have done a lot of great things in their life to to build on to new companies. A lot of people that have worked at SpaceX have definitely gone on to do a lot of more interesting things than just SpaceX, and that's kind of the fun of this podcast.

Peter: 19:35

We always used to joke that SpaceX was a cross between Animal House and Apollo 13. Being able to see people on the other side, knowing that they've been able to take these lessons that they learned and these experiences and and do good with them or, you know, be able to live the life that they wanted to, you know, hopefully will show other people that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that, you know, there's definite balance in life and that we can achieve it if we really want.

Jeff: 19:59

I don't know. I think we might take it for granted. It's easy to say that people can achieve it if they want. But you had an internship at SpaceX, and now everybody and their dog wants to work at SpaceX. Since we were lucky to get in and then get out, it's easier for us to say that the light at the end of the tunnel isn't an oncoming train.

Peter: 20:16

Oh, definitely. You know, people want to people want to be there, and and I fully appreciate that. And, you know, part of me wants to be there still. But, know, it's understanding the devil in the details of working at a place like that and understanding that it's not all roses. You know, there's dark spots in it as well.

Jeff: 20:34

Thanks, Pete. I really appreciate your openness during the interview. I think that's what it's gonna take to really show people what it's like to be inside SpaceX and then come out the other side of SpaceX and try something interesting and exciting.

Peter: 20:45

It definitely opens up doors and it shows you a lot about a lot of different aspects of life.

Jeff: 20:51

After talking to Pete, I tried to imagine what I might have done if I had started at SpaceX when I was 19 and left with a stack of share options at 23, but I just don't know. That curiosity is one of the motivations for this podcast. I know that when I talked to you originally, you said I should look for somebody more famous, but I think your story is quintessential SpaceX story. Started as an intern, faced the culture of working hard and playing hard and doing the impossible, got out of that, then went on to do something else that we still don't know if it's possible or not. Thanks so much.

Peter Dohm: 21:22

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me, Jeff. This was fun. I appreciate you reaching out to me, and it was a pleasure talking to you, sharing the stories, and reminiscing on some good times.

Jeff: 21:33

Thanks for tuning in and listening to Pete's story on the first episode of It's Not Rocket Science. If you want more background information, check out It's notrocketsciencepodcast.com, and in a week or so, I'll have another great interview posted.