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An interview with engineers Erin Gatling and Casey Schilling about SpaceX, raising kids on a boat, sheltering in place in Baja, and what life is about.
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?
What I really want you to know is that if you've ever dreamed of quitting your job and sailing around the world, episode two of It's Not Rocket Science will give you food for thought. My name is Jeff Ward, and for a few years, I was SpaceX VP of avionics. This podcast is my project to understand and document the lives of people who worked for Elon Musk, got the t shirt, and then decided to do something else. When you work at a place like SpaceX, your work life and your social life tend to merge, so there are a lot of SpaceX couples on my interview list.
Jeff:For this episode, I spoke to one of the o g SpaceX couples, Erin Gatling and Casey Schilling. We have lift off. We have lift off. Okay. I think we're up and running.
Jeff:Go ahead and introduce yourselves.
Casey:I'm Casey Schilling, and this is my wife, Erin Gatling. Hey there.
Jeff:We're
Casey:we both started in at SpaceX and met at SpaceX in 2008, and we worked there for ten years.
Erin:Yep. Our last day of working was around Halloween time, 2018.
Jeff:Did you guys meet because you were doing similar jobs?
Erin:Very different jobs, but we did intercept a lot, especially in the beginning days because the company was small. I think it was around 500 people. And then at the end there, oh, I think we're it's about 8,000 people, so we didn't intercept quite as often.
Jeff:And what did you do there?
Casey:So I started as a structural dynamics analyst. I figured out how much different parts of the rocket shook, how to design and test parts, deal with how much they shake, and how to measure it. And me and my team, towards the end of it, were responsible for every sensor that flew on every vehicle. We got to dabble in every part of the rocket. We really got to learn what each different team cared about.
Jeff:How about you, Erin?
Erin:I started as a Falcon manufacturing engineer, out how to build the rocket, write the instructions, and then take those instructions to the floor and work with the technicians to actually put the hardware together like we imagined in the three d model. And then every time we ran into an issue, we would figure out how to solve that problem and solve it and take all those lessons learned back to the design engineers and implement them to build faster and faster and then eventually turning what was like a garage into a production facility and an assembly line and making it faster and faster.
Jeff:How did you end up at SpaceX?
Erin:I was working at Raytheon for three years after college. And my neighbor who was Dragon manufacturing engineer worked there at SpaceX and he was like, hey, I think you should come into SpaceX for an interview. We really need someone like you to help us build Falcon. And I was like, not interested. Thanks.
Erin:And then I finally went in for a tour with him before the first successful launch. And I just knew the second I was on that floor looking at these extremely powerful rocket engines. And I was just like, wow. This is exactly where I'm supposed to be. And, there was no turning back after after that.
Casey:I stumbled into it. I went to SpaceX as an intern between undergrad and getting a PhD. And then once I got an internship, I just never left. Meeting with Elon is what finally tipped the scales cause you couldn't just tell him like, hey, there's no way I'm staying. I'm gonna go get a PhD.
Casey:I met with Elon in person and interviewed with him. And my final question to him was, can I drive your car? And he was like, sure. Yeah. To him, it was just a car.
Casey:He's like, you can drive it. So I got to drive his car, and that car is the Tesla that launched on Falcon Heavy and flew to Mars.
Jeff:So I'm talking to Starman?
Casey:Yeah. When Elon tweeted out that he was gonna launch his car in Falcon Heavy, I turned to Aaron. I was like, what? And Aaron's like, oh, yeah. I've known about this for months.
Erin:He's like, why didn't you tell me? I'm like, oh, I was told I wasn't supposed to tell anybody.
Jeff:What was the atmosphere like at SpaceX in those early years?
Casey:SpaceX at the time was a small risky company that hadn't launched any rockets successfully. It felt not that different from college to me. A bunch of eager engineers working late hours, working as hard as they could, getting creative.
Erin:So for me, I was really I really noticed when I was there that every single person was working hard and they seemed to want to be there and want to work hard. The other reason I I probably felt the need to be there was, I I grew up around NASCAR, powerful racing engines, and everyone working in a shop, and it felt like that. Except these engines were even bigger and more powerful, and I thought that was so freaking cool, and I needed to be there.
Jeff:I'm guessing there weren't too many women engineers in Formula one garages or rocket factories.
Erin:It's very male dominated. And that's one really cool aspects of SpaceX is the president is female. And every inner encounter I've ever had with Elon and most of the people there, they don't care, male, female, at all. Like it's just, can you do the job? And can you do it?
Erin:Excellent. Are you gonna be the top of the top? And if so, you're hired. Now now with that being said, of course, there's been moments throughout my career at SpaceX where there have been people that work there that are not that way. But those people honestly didn't last.
Casey:I never had a male boss my whole time at SpaceX. I've had multiple bosses, and every single one of them has been female.
Jeff:How about working for Elon? What was that like?
Casey:Most people would consider him surprisingly hands on for a CEO of a company that size. We met with him every four to six months, but it would usually be a detailed review of the sensors on some part of the rocket. He would take a look at the engine and say, woah, there's a lot of sensors on this engine. What's going on? And so my team and the engine responsible engineers would be called into his office The next morning, we'd be told like, hey, you got a brief Elon line by line.
Casey:And he would make calls. For me, it was a really detailed level for a CEO of such a big company.
Erin:And it wasn't detailed in just the design. When we were really in the heart of trying to speed up how long it took to build these rockets, Elon moved his desk to the production floor and sat out there.
Jeff:I thought that was just a myth.
Erin:No. Not a myth. He was there.
Jeff:Did you find it inspiring?
Erin:Definitely. You look over and you see that your CEO is still at work and it's late. Sometimes it's the weekend and he wants to hear what you are struggling with and and how he can help you make it better.
Jeff:When you think back on it, what really stands out from your time at SpaceX?
Erin:Flight one, of course.
Jeff:Which flight one?
Erin:Falcon. Good question.
Casey:Which flight one?
Jeff:So this clarification is important because Aaron and Casey participated in a lot of flight ones. First Falcon one, first Falcon nine, first Dragon, first reusable rocket.
Erin:Falcon nine, flight one, the very first flight of Falcon nine because it was just so new, and we worked so, so hard on it.
Jeff:And what was your expectation of that day when you had that first Falcon nine on the pad? What did you realistically think was gonna happen?
Erin:I thought there would be some sort of an error at some point. I hoped it wasn't gonna be at the beginning so that, you know, we could get as far as possible and learn as much as possible.
Jeff:I was on console in the blockhouse for Falcon nine flight one, and I was just hoping that the vehicle would get out of sight and away from the pad before anything bad happened. So you were surprised that we reached orbit that day?
Erin:Yes. I was. I was surprised.
Casey:I think for me,
Jeff:it was
Erin:I was pretty confident, but I was surprised.
Casey:For me, I think max q, max dynamic pressure of flight one was probably the scariest moment for me.
Jeff:I'm actually a computer engineer, not an aerospace engineer. But I think a good analogy for aerodynamic pressure is how much water you hit as you drive faster and faster through a rainstorm that's ending. At liftoff, the rocket is accelerating, but the atmosphere is getting thinner. At some point, as you drive, you're hitting the maximum amount of rain, and that's maximum aerodynamic pressure, max q, the point of maximum stress on the rocket.
Casey:Because at that point, was still part of the structural dynamics department, and I knew how rough the aerodynamic loads could be. We did a ton of work. We did everything we could, but you just actually going and breaking the sound barrier and finding out how rough it is.
Erin:Yeah. I think we were all confident we did the best that we could, and it was it was time to launch it and see what happened. But we were all pretty darn scared of what what actually happened.
Jeff:Were you in Florida or California for the launch?
Erin:So neither one. We were, on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. What happens at SpaceX in those days is you have a schedule and you plan around that schedule, but you make sure you don't plan too close to it because schedules slip. So we we planned our first big vacation together.
Casey:It was like a
Erin:Like six months or a year in advance. And we just were like, there's no way it'll land on the same day. And it did.
Casey:So we were in The Maldives on like we weren't married yet but it was like almost like a honeymoon. We were
Jeff:on a
Erin:was our honeymoon. We never took another one.
Casey:So yeah, we were in The Maldives for Falcon nine flight one launch.
Erin:Yes. And it was two or 3AM and we had the all the hotel employees like working on the internet at this little sandy bar watching the launch with us. It was pretty epic. And then for breakfast, a couple hours later, we we needed champagne, right?
Casey:Right.
Erin:Celebrate. Were like, we still have jobs. Woo. And so the breakfast champagne menu, man, we were at an expensive place apparently because the cheapest half bottle of champagne was $75.
Jeff:You guys were popping champagne in The Maldives and we were partying on Cocoa Beach Pier.
Erin:I'll never forget that. I still have the quirk.
Jeff:Eight years after that somewhat tentative Falcon nine launch, SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy, essentially three Falcon nine strapped together side by side. 1,700,000 pounds of thrust, the most powerful rocket currently in production. Did you guys get trapped on an island for the Falcon Heavy launch too?
Erin:We watched in person. So it was a Tuesday morning launch, and Monday, we booked red eye flights to Florida. We flew across the country, went straight from the airport to the launch site and watched it launch with our two little kids.
Jeff:How old were they?
Erin:One and three or two and four.
Jeff:Were they super excited?
Erin:So they can see a Vandenberg launch from our backyard in California. So I get home from work one day after one of the really cool Vandenberg launches where it lit up the sky. And the first thing they say is, hey, mom, were you on that rocket today? Them, it's just super normal.
Jeff:I watched it on TV and it was not super normal.
Erin:It was epic and it was a career high. It was also really the day that I knew that Casey and I would be okay leaving SpaceX and and jumping into the next chapter of our lives, that I would have no regrets of, like, you know, meeting our career or my career goals. I felt like I met him at that point.
Jeff:By the time of that Falcon Heavy launch, you guys were routinely bringing back first stage boosters, but I know that the road to reusability was very, very long.
Casey:Even the Falcons that didn't even make it to orbit, there were parachutes on
Erin:Yeah. That's what I was about to bring
Casey:hope to get the rocket back.
Erin:Yeah.
Casey:So changed from hopes and dreams to reality, and it changed over time. I saw iterations, especially dealing dealing with structural dynamics. It was fun the second time around when I was working with the engineers, and then I was like, oh, didn't you ask the previous guy, like, what he designed it to? And he was like, oh, what? We tried this before?
Erin:Yeah. So what I was actually going to mention is one of my favorite moments ever at SpaceX was the day we landed, the first rocket. Because so many people around us that were cheering had no idea how long we've been trying to bring a rocket back and land it. And I remember that moment very clearly. I like locked eyes with one of the OG old school SpaceXers that had been around since flight one.
Erin:And we just looked at each other and we were like, oh my gosh. We did it. And I think we both, like, shed a tear in that moment. We said, how many people around us have any idea that we put a parachute on the first few flights and tried to bring them back? And it was just like, we just did it.
Erin:Oh my gosh. So many years of trying.
Jeff:And I think a lot of people believe that it would never work.
Erin:A lot of people.
Jeff:Because it didn't work for a long time.
Casey:Yeah. It didn't work.
Erin:And then you have the people that believe we faked it.
Jeff:Well, I think that was one of the impressive points of the the Falcon Heavy launch was just seeing those two first stages come down.
Erin:That was the best moment of the launch, to be honest. Landing legs are deployed. Looking over in person and seeing two rockets landing at the same time was the highlight. And the Falcon have landed.
Jeff:So after Falcon Heavy and attaining your professional goals, what are your current projects?
Casey:There's two big projects. Yeah. We left SpaceX was it two years ago now?
Erin:Almost.
Casey:So almost two years ago because we've got two kids, Gunnar and Paige, a boy and a girl, four and six years old. And we realized we were kind of missing them grow up. We had grandparents helping take care of them and nannies and daycare and we just weren't seeing them. We left SpaceX and we got a sailboat and started a project to sail around the world. We did the Caribbean circuit last winter.
Casey:For the most part, it was the two of us and our two kids on a sailboat sailing around The Caribbean.
Jeff:Were you experienced sailors or just living the dream?
Casey:So I've raced sailboats since I was 10 years old, which means I knew how to handle a sailboat and I knew the sails, but that is still very different than living on a boat and cruising more to see the sights and for leisure. It's kinda like a a truck driver and a NASCAR driver are not the same type of driver.
Jeff:Is it hard raising kids on the water?
Erin:Yeah. I don't know. I never struggled with moving on board with little kids, and I get this question a lot. Like, oh my goodness. Are you scared they're gonna fall overboard and and drown?
Erin:And, yes, that's a risk, but we just establish rules. So they were two and four, when we moved aboard. They both already knew how to swim. We were very, very focused on teaching them that before we left. Just like you have rules in your house, don't run into the street.
Erin:We have rules on the boat. Don't cross this part of the boat.
Casey:Being on being on a boat wasn't as big of a transition as just living full time with the kids. The biggest difference was going from being at work most of the day where you you mentally get time to yourself to living on a boat, is a small space. There's no escaping the kids twenty four seven. Like, they're there all the time.
Erin:Becoming a full time mom and, and then starting to homeschool. Oh, man. Biggest transition. Toughest transition ever. It's not like work where you can, like, talk to other adults and they'll listen and they'll do what you say if it makes sense.
Erin:There's no reasoning with a two year old, and I completely had to figure that out. It was really hard for me. And I'm just, like, so impressed with all the stay at home moms out there. I think it took me a solid six months to get comfortable raising my own kids, which sounds silly because they're my kids, but that was never my plan. I had always wanted to be a working mom.
Erin:You hear me say that, and then I'll tell you that quitting SpaceX to go be a full time travel family was completely my idea. It sounded like a huge challenge to learn how to parent my kids better, and I knew that I felt complete with what I had done in my career at SpaceX. And I I knew that I wouldn't get the time back from my kids that were growing too fast. I can't go backwards in time there. I'd already missed a whole bunch of milestones.
Erin:So to me that sounded like the biggest challenge I'd ever heard of. And I I love challenges. So I I took on the challenge of figuring out how to how to mom better.
Casey:The other incident that tipped the scales was I got into a sailboat racing accident and got my leg caught in one of the ropes of the sails and nearly lost my leg and my life. I had the coast guard come pick me up in a helicopter and rush me to surgery. That was one of the incidents that made us realize that, you know, life is is not guaranteed and family mattered more than the job and we were kind of missing family.
Erin:Yeah. That was really the moment. And then even I think it was two days later, Casey's still in the hospital. We got a phone call that someone I worked close with at SpaceX got into a motorcycle accident and passed away on his way home from work. And so we just looked at each other and we were like, we can work again later once we aren't the kids worlds.
Erin:But right now at this young age, it goes by so fast and we're their world. We need to stop and we need to pause and we need to be with them and make the most of every day, try to live our best life because life is super short.
Jeff:One of the reasons I started this podcast was to explore what SpaceXers do once they have financial and professional success. I started this interview thinking that Aaron and Casey had decided to take a long vacation, but it's really more subtle than that.
Erin:If you didn't have to worry about finances, what would you wanna do with your life? That was the question we were trying to ask ourselves when we were trying to figure out what was next. And and that's part of what led us to, okay, well, what makes us happy? We bought a big house. We bought a fancy car.
Erin:We have the American dream, but guess what? The American dream is not what makes you happy. It just isn't. Over the course of about two years, we sold all of our stuff that we had bought, downsized to a boat, and actually we've downsized again to an RV.
Jeff:Is that the second half of the project?
Casey:Yeah. Yeah. The boat project's not over, but it's on delay. Last fall, we had the boat in a boat yard, and the yard made a mistake. They dropped the boat off the jack stands.
Casey:So the boat is wrecked. That put the boat trip on pause. We shopped around pretty quickly because
Erin:We were homeless and living in hotels.
Casey:Yeah. We lived in hotels for a little bit. Shopped for an RV. Got an RV. Turns out they're a lot like boats.
Casey:They're just land boats.
Erin:We end up in Arizona with this social group that we heard about through Facebook. And yeah, they said, hey, in two weeks, we're all going to Mexico for ten days. You wanna come? We're like, Mexico sounds sketchy but you're the first people we've ever met and we want friends. So sure.
Erin:We'll come.
Casey:Once the pandemic kinda hit and we saw borders shutting down, we found an RV park that was mostly empty, and we just kind of hunkered down on the beach and hung out for a while. We just sheltered in place.
Erin:So we were there for five months, which we thought was gonna be ten days.
Casey:And And turned out to be a great trip. Mexico was awesome.
Erin:It's not sketchy. It's not scary.
Casey:Yeah. We got to spend our winter in Baja, Mexico, hanging out on beaches, meeting other RVers.
Erin:Trip of a lifetime.
Jeff:Are you planning to just travel forever, or is there a master plan?
Casey:We have short term plans of RV travel in The US. There's still a lot of places in The US we wanna see. And after that, we hope the boat gets fixed in roughly a six month time frame. But with repair projects like this, you never know. So we still are trying to circumnavigate the world.
Casey:And then after that, we don't know. We kind of assume that circumnavigating the world, we will learn a lot culturally and we'll learn a lot about ourselves, and then we'll know what we wanna do.
Jeff:So even though your boat's called endless playtime, there's a deeper goal hidden in there.
Casey:Yeah. And I think that's something we're still figuring out. We're lucky to be able to travel at the level we are. The hardest thing was giving up a regular paycheck. And in our travels, we've met so many people that are just the full range of the financial spectrum.
Casey:We've met people way more well off than us. And also people that don't have savings and they find a way to make it work. To to travel doesn't actually take a lot of means. It takes that leap of faith to uproot yourself. With our kids, one of the biggest things is they get to see a lot and meet so many people.
Erin:They can make friends so fast. Yeah.
Casey:So they can make friends across language barriers, across cultures.
Erin:And I really noticed it when we came back, to visit the grandparents and it happened to be Gunner's birthday. And, Gunner takes his cake and walks around the entire restaurant to every table and tries to pass out his cake to everybody. He thinks that it's normal to just go be friends immediately with every kid in the whole restaurant. And and I think that's awesome.
Jeff:It sounds like one of the greatest benefits of this adventure will be how it shapes your kids.
Erin:Yes. And I think there's another aspect we haven't touched on, which is the way it affects the environment. Yes. We had an electric car because we worked for Elon, we had a Tesla, but you know, I grew up with gas guzzlers, so I had that as well. But you know, the big house burns a lot of electricity.
Erin:So we have really, really, really changed our lives and our mentality and our desires to live with much less. When we changed our lifestyle, we changed our full lifestyle to live with less. I think what's what's really been big that maybe I kind of expected, but I really didn't expect it to hit me in the heart as much as it has is changing my entire lifestyle to be more eco friendly and environmentally friendly and to try to encourage other people to do that as well for the future of our planet.
Jeff:I initially thought of the sailboat and the RV as luxuries, but you're telling me that they're actually economies.
Casey:Yeah. Our house is now eight foot by 40 foot.
Erin:And it was 3,600 square foot. So we gave up our big house so that we could give up our paycheck and live much smaller and on much less per month. But right now, we're still living off our savings from SpaceX.
Casey:And I'm mostly doing engineering. We wanna add solar to our RV. I've been designing that system.
Erin:Yeah. And we do a whole lot more do it yourself repair jobs, especially on the boat because you have to be your own mechanic out there in the middle of the ocean. So even
Casey:And a window falls out of your boat, you've gotta put it back in yourself.
Jeff:Sounds like a story.
Erin:That's a story for sure.
Casey:That was
Erin:Our first really big sail.
Casey:We sailed out of the East Coast, and we were headed for the British Virgin Islands in The Caribbean. Twelve and a half days with no sight of land. I was up on deck doing some stuff and walking back inside, I saw a wave of water splash inside the boat on the right and there should not be a wave of water.
Erin:In our bedroom.
Casey:We have an escape hatch that is just a foot above the waterline. The glass had debonded from the frame, fallen out. Luckily, it caught on its hatch handles.
Erin:I think two more waves that would have been in the ocean.
Casey:Yeah. So I grabbed it, yelled for the crew to to to turn the boat, to turn into the waves so the waves would stop splashing into the window. And
Erin:And then you yelled, Aaron, help. What do we do? Because I'm the one that built rockets and solved all these problems on the rocket. Right? So for me, it was a wildly similar feeling to being called out to the floor for a problem on the rocket and coming up with a solution and doing it.
Casey:So we went through maybe five different types of adhesive that was all too dry. Like it had expired or was too dry before I had to take a nap. At some point, I was just too tired.
Erin:Yeah. We had to take turns taking naps and working on the window. So I think most people in this situation would have been very freaked out. Oh my gosh. Like I just heard a story about this happening and, you know, they lost their boat and had to get coast guard rescued.
Casey:Yeah. When this happened, we're 500 miles from shore. We're days from land. We can't get to land.
Erin:And we're too far for a meaningful coast guard. But none of that really crossed my mind. I was like, oh, this is a cool problem to solve. That that that's just the way I'm wired, I guess. And, so we solved it.
Jeff:That story reminds me of The Martian, extreme DIY with self sufficiency under trying circumstances.
Casey:Oh, yeah.
Erin:You have to solve it with what you have.
Jeff:Thank you guys for taking the time to talk to me and coming north to where you had some decent Internet.
Erin:Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Internet's so much better here than Mexico.
Jeff:How can people keep up with your travels?
Erin:So Gunnar named our boat Endless Playtime, and we kinda went with that.
Jeff:So if you wanna keep up with Aaron and Casey and their extreme DIY, be sure to follow them at endlessplaytime.com and on social media. I appreciate you taking the time to listen to episode two of It's Not Rocket Science. It was hard to condense Aaron and Casey's story into twenty five minutes, but that's my commitment to you. I'll also work on getting the episodes flowing a bit more quickly now that winter is here and I'm getting better at the podcast production. If you have comments or wanna see background information, go to it'snotrocketsciencepodcast.com or on Twitter at notrocketspod.
Jeff:And if you're curious, the beeps I'm using to flag my commentary are called quindar tones, and they date back to project Gemini.