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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?
So today, I'm excited because I actually get to talk to somebody who's been to space. Doctor Hans Koenigsmann is an OG SpaceXer, a good friend and a long term colleague. He's built small satellites and rockets and space capsules and even his own airplane. And recently, he flew on the New Shepard rocket to the Karman line and the edge of space. I'm Jeff Ward, and this is my podcast, It's Not Rocket Science.
Jeff:So we could just start out. You tell us who you are and, you know, I don't know, what you had for breakfast or how you met me.
Hans:Yeah. Hans Koenigsmann. Let's see. I I have tea and and a toast for breakfast. I drink tea, not coffee, so I can't answer that question.
Hans:How did you meet? We met when you replaced me as a VP of avionics at SpaceX.
Jeff:I think we must have met before.
Hans:I think we met before too. Yeah. I did work for for SAARI actually for a couple of weeks in '96, I believe.
Jeff:Yeah. And that's when we would have probably met and crossed paths.
Hans:But then the cross path probably also at the EUDA Small Space EUDA Small Satellite Conference. And I mean, I was working on a small satellite in Germany, and you were working on small satellites in England. So obviously, you must have crossed path. Yeah.
Jeff:Yeah. I certainly felt that when I got to SpaceX, I already knew you a little bit. Like, we weren't complete strangers by any means when I got there.
Hans:Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff:And and, yeah, came into the avionics crew and tried to figure out what to do, or what Elon wanted me to do.
Hans:Yeah. I think there's some some stuff you should talk about too. What what he wanted you to do, or rather what he wanted me not to do, or whatever you, however you say this.
Jeff:Well certainly the way that I got it at that time was it is a growth issue. Know, he's always had his eyes set on rapid growth and he wanted more ability to do that. And I guess what I was doing at Surrey, which was mainly not technical at that time, was mainly corporate growth stuff, was why he brought me in there.
Hans:I I think from my side, I can tell you that I I never had a double e, right? So I actually don't know how to really build electronics, although I did build electronics. So I think we got to the point where I think we wanted to be improving the avionics on the technical side more than I was capable of. And and that's how I interpreted that. And that's why I actually Right.
Hans:I actually embraced it because I think, okay, this is this actually, I'm I'm kind of out of my water anyways. So I think that's a good thing that I can focus on GNC and FTS.
Jeff:Yeah. And those were things, GNC especially, and FTS, which we didn't have on satellites, which is what I've been working to on my whole life, were things I didn't know that much about. I, you know, I knew the vocabulary, but not the mathematics. I always felt that you and I worked out a good solution to the whole thing, and the evidence seems to be that you were there for much longer than I was there.
Hans:Well, it's also I kind of, along the way, when we launched Falcon one, I mean, or tried to launch Falcon one in this misery of three failing launches, I became more interested on the system and tried to make the system work.
Jeff:Right.
Hans:And so, in this this launch chief engineering thing and so I wasn't actually that much interested in the in the avionics after that.
Jeff:Right.
Hans:And I think that was roughly the timing. Right? You came in on flight?
Jeff:Yeah, just I came in just before flight three. Yeah. Or maybe yeah, or call it just after flight two. We were in the data analysis on flight two and then I was done in Kwaj on flight three. Yeah.
Jeff:Yeah. So interestingly, how did you end up at SpaceX? Like, you mentioned that you worked on small satellites in Europe, and how did that eventually lead you to come to The States?
Hans:Probably you probably know John Wertz from Michael Korsun, right? I worked with him yeah. I worked with him a little bit. I actually organized some classes in Germany for him. And then he just made me an offer.
Hans:Do you want to come to The US on an h one b visa for two years or so, is what he said. And my wife in particular, her reader, liked it. And and so it was more like an adventure to go to Los Angeles for two years. And and then, Jim, the work at Michael Korsun was originally supposed to be writing a book, but ended up a lot more hard work because I'm just Harper centric. And then I had this Scorpios program, and I ended up working on the rocket.
Hans:And I ended up basically doing the whole avionics system on the rocket. I'll be honest, GNC, it wasn't very successful. But at the end of the day, I learned a little bit more about rockets, and I kind of liked it. It was interesting. It was work in the field.
Hans:And satellite work was always, like, a little bit like, you know, it goes there, and and and then you have this connection, but it's not totally hands on.
Jeff:You can't touch it.
Hans:Correct. So I liked it. And then along the way, I ran into Elon. He must have gotten my number from Kassomsen, I believe. And then he called me up and asked me if I'm interested.
Hans:And I wasn't really happy at the time. By that time, I extended my visa. I actually applied for a green card. And so by that time, I was really looking for other jobs. And so to me, this was perfect because I knew he had enough money to to survive at least three years.
Hans:Right. I think in the end, it was actually six years. So you don't you didn't have to deal with us. But the one thing that really annoyed me on my work previously, both in LA and also back in Bremen, is that you always had to find money. And it was it was just increasingly harder and harder to find research money, especially in Germany.
Hans:Here, was much easier, but still, like, every time, like, a quarter or a third of your time is wasted on finding money.
Jeff:Yeah. That's interesting. It sounds like you guys, both in Germany and when you were with Microcosm, you were in the driver's seat in terms of doing the fundraising as well as doing the technology.
Hans:Yeah. Part of my motivation was actually to work at Microcosm because I wanted to learn, like, the the last things about RTP control that I haven't. And then I I just found out basically I was doing it myself anyway. Always so I was I was pretty much always self sufficient. Like, you you you tell me tell me what to do, and then I just I just do it.
Hans:And and and I didn't need a lot of advice on do this or do that.
Jeff:Which is kind of the perfect way to come into SpaceX, I think.
Hans:Correct. That that's I think that's why it worked so so so well and so long. Yeah. I mean, sometimes from my perspective, I actually wish somebody would have given me advice or taught me things better than what I already made up myself. But that just rarely happened.
Jeff:Did you find that that did happen at all at SpaceX once we started getting engaged with external Yeah. Players who knew what they were doing more than we did maybe or or thought they knew more?
Hans:No. I think it happened primarily with the guidance and control field or with George Erger, who was a consultant that we hired. And he was extremely, I think, productive in terms of teaching people how to do this, how to how to build a guidance and control system for for a rocket. So I I learned a lot with that. I learned a lot on other stuff too.
Hans:And I think just in general, we we cooperated a lot more than I was used to from other jobs, much closer work together.
Jeff:I think that's interesting. I felt that at SpaceX, we eventually did a good job of finding people who really knew a certain technology or a certain technique and inheriting from them as much as we could, as quickly as we could, and then mixing that in with the kind of SpaceX special sauce.
Hans:I think I think that's Leo. I think you're you're right. We didn't we didn't have the specialists in the beginning. We had mostly all around people that that could make things work and fill the gaps that they had, I guess, with sound judgment and reason. But they weren't specialists.
Hans:They were basically people that you can say they used duct tape and zip ties to make things work.
Jeff:Certainly by the time I got there, the team was very strong. I got there in 2007 in the spring. And it wasn't big, but the people who were there like yourself, Tim Buzzer, Chris Thompson, of course Tom, they were people who had deep knowledge and knew what they were doing.
Hans:Yeah. Yeah. They were they were always a very high performing team, but, yeah, there was there was just nobody who who didn't know what they were doing. We all knew what they were doing.
Jeff:Did you get into space originally when you were in Germany as a choice? Was that your first choice when you were a student, or was it something you drifted onto?
Hans:No, it wasn't. It was airplanes. You know, I'm a handicapped pilot.
Jeff:Right.
Hans:My vision wasn't good enough for flying at that time. Now it's fixed. But so I I I think this was, like, the sec best choice was aeronautical engineering, worked in airplanes. And then I ran into you probably remember him too, Amnon Gennady.
Jeff:Guy from European Space Agency.
Hans:Exactly. We became a good friend. And over through Amnon, I basically got pulled over to the satellite technology department, started working on energy control. I was fascinated actually with gyros and the motion of that. And so I kind of like totally abandoned the airplanes and went over to the satellite and did that.
Jeff:And then from satellites to The US and attitude control and then from that into SpaceX. It's interesting. One of the things that one of the things that struck me as funny is you're coming to The US for two years is like me going to England for a year. Twenty twenty years Yes. Twenty years later, I came back to America.
Jeff:And here, like, twenty five years later, you're still here. Thirty years later.
Hans:Actually, in a month, it's exactly thirty years. And I don't see my I don't see myself going back, actually.
Jeff:You do travel back to Europe though, don't you, from time to time?
Hans:I do. I old parents now.
Jeff:And when you got into SpaceX, you went directly into guidance navigation control. That was the slot that was that's what Elon needed done?
Hans:It was a little bit No. It was it what what so we had we had Chris Thompson and Tom Mueller, right? So it was propulsion was covered, structures was covered, and then pretty much the rest of it, other than the launch side, was me. And because Avionics included software, if you remember that? Yes.
Hans:It included flight safety and it included guidance and control. So it was all four of them together in one.
Jeff:It's a big portfolio. And I think Yeah. The funny thing when I got there was to kind of describe it to people as everything that wasn't made out of metal and didn't make fire.
Hans:Yeah. Exactly. It's just it's just it's just the way it came because of Tom Tom and Chris before before me, basically.
Jeff:I think it's also part of the question of rockets versus satellites. Satellites are kind of led by this electronics crowd and software. And then rockets were not led by that crowd at all. Rockets were led by people who made fire.
Hans:Mostly, yes. If you if I look back now, I think it's more like more like a systems kind of job, and it included those systems, avionics, FTS, and so on, and flight termination, should say. Software and guidance and control, and but we we we never called it systems anything.
Jeff:Yeah, think that's true that the avionics touches everything, the software touches everything, and so you have to have the system overview of the vehicle, and that makes it more natural the way that your responsibilities changed over the course of time.
Hans:The I think the the responsibilities were also they were also drawn by a little bit by personal preference. Like, I owned the actuators on the on the engines initially, the TVC actuators.
Jeff:Yeah. I remember that.
Hans:Right. Because I built I built them at one point. We or rather, you know, in my within within the VEONICS, we built the second stage actuators. And electric actuators were pretty cool, actually. And and I understood the hydraulics pretty well.
Hans:And it was, for me, was part of GNC. Right. So GNC had for me a hardware component, and that was a hardware component. And so that's why we ended up doing that. It's not that's not the case anymore.
Hans:I think it changed I think it changed maybe with you that it moved over to propulsion. Is that possible?
Jeff:I think sometime during my tenure, it wasn't something that moved immediately. But I think sometime that period it did move as the types of actuators and the sort of the diversity of the actuators started to increase. I do think that that reflects something of the small satellite ethos though, is that you own the hardware that implements what you're trying to implement. Yep. And that GNC didn't just outsource cameras and gyros and thrusters, GNC was an owner of those pieces of technology so that you understood the control laws that would actually make things do what you wanted.
Hans:You can also I mean, there's if you work otherwise in the system, you write specifications, then you add margin to it, you pass it on, right? And then that person adds the margin to it, and you end up with a much more constrained system than if you actually do the work yourself. And you know that if it's a sloppy gyro, you can probably compensate the GPS, and you can probably compensate a sloppy thrust vector control with I don't know with stability margin. So the trade is actually in your department and not just somewhere else.
Jeff:Absolutely. I think the description that you just made of trading risk and passing risk down, which ultimately makes things less efficient, is one of the key insights that changed over the last twenty years in space engineering in the best companies. I don't know if it changed everywhere, but I think the best companies
Hans:Yeah. Don't think it did. I think I think it changed at SpaceX, but I don't think I don't I don't think anybody else changed it. Everybody else just goes the traditional way of any margin and then throwing it down over the
Jeff:And I suspect that at the smaller companies, they start out that way with a more holistic approach to margin, and then they get corporatized as the management becomes more conservative and more systematic, and then you end up with the traditional groups within a company selling things to one another and acting like little companies rather than acting like members of an integrated systems team.
Hans:Exactly.
Jeff:I know that like me, you worked directly for Elon, so your interactions with him were not occasional, they were pretty much constant. Did you have anything that sticks out in your mind as like, oh, when you met him, or like the thing that defined him for you during those early years?
Hans:Yeah, I thought about this. So one thing that I have is when we talk, you know, and and if you were to talk longer about this, you know, things would pop up. Would go, oh, yeah. I remember this one. I remember that one.
Hans:Right? So my that's how my brain these days should works a little bit. But just out of the cold, the two things that I remember. One one thing was we had this meeting after flight three, and you might recall that too, where he Elon had said earlier that he's in for three flights. And after we basically crashed three rockets, that kind of seemed to be the end of it.
Hans:Especially since we didn't have much money, and and so he basically assembled everybody in the room, conference room, and and then he basically said, okay, We have a second rocket, and you have six weeks to launch it. That's kind of what I what I remember from that. And it kind of really surprised me because I was frustrated and and almost giving up at that time, and he was just the opposite.
Jeff:You mean the fourth you said a second rocket, but you meant we got another one. We have a fourth rocket.
Hans:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Fourth rocket.
Hans:And then we and we flew that out and basically did did a Hail Mary with that rocket by by selling it with an airplane and then just by that time, we basically used the credit cards and and figured out you pay this when we when we get this done or we don't.
Jeff:It sounds like that was like that was the time that he you saw that something that now is characteristic of him, he doesn't give things up. Yeah. He doesn't
Hans:give up, and he doubles down on things, in this case the right thing. And we we we ended up, you know, flying that fourth one to orbit successfully. The other thing I remember is totally different. It's like we had Elon was at Kvaerstle at one point, and I don't think it was a trip where you were there.
Jeff:I only went down there one time, and it was before it was when we didn't launch. I don't remember why not. We had intended to launch, but we didn't, and then I went back to LA. Take a second to explain Kwajalein.
Hans:Right. Sure. Okay. So Kwajalein is not tall in the Marshall Islands. The Marshall Islands are roughly when you go from LA to Hawaii and just continue the same direction, the same distance halfway to Australia.
Hans:There's like little spots on the map, and those are islands. And one of them is a whole lot tall. It's pretty large, actually. It's 100 miles by 60 miles or something like that. Yeah?
Hans:Has a weird form too. And Crossland is the lower island. The the one of the biggest islands there has a has an airport, is an army base that's supported by the Marshallese. And then we we got an island there called Omelac where we launched from. It's in the middle of the ocean.
Hans:You can't really damage anything when you crash a rocket. So it's it's a pretty safe safe place for flight testing. And it's hard to get there. It's tropical. It's nine degrees at the equator.
Hans:It's very warm. And it's but the one thing that it really has that that is really good there is diving. It's excellent diving. So we we decided to take out Elon for diving. And and Sharon Hurst was the site director at the time, and she was also dike master.
Hans:And she basically put everything on Elon, and then he ran in the water. And then she held his, what's it called? The the thing where you basically test the cook the do the buoyancy, so up and down. So she was basically controlling Elon's Elon's buoyancy, and Elon was just was just paddling next to her. It was it was hilarious.
Hans:It was really funny. It was memorable also because the dive was really great. We went down, there's this cliff, and it goes down to, I don't know, a couple thousand feet. There's big fish. Wow.
Hans:So that's the other the other memory that I that I have.
Jeff:It's the only time that I've been scuba diving was when I was down there, and Sharon took a bunch of us out one day.
Hans:Exactly. And and I got back into scuba diving. I I still did some here too, and but it's just hard to compare.
Jeff:Yeah. There's nothing like being in the tropics. Did you across the time I mean, worked at SpaceX for how long?
Hans:I worked nineteen years and nineteen and a half years, pretty much. Close to twenty.
Jeff:So it's probably difficult across twenty years to pick out an incident that defines the organization for you, but I did give you a heads up on the question. I'm wondering if there's anything that stands out in your mind as being your quintessential SpaceX experience of a certain era, of course. Each era is different.
Hans:I mean, it's hard to say. So I definitely changed, right? I mean, was the, like, skeptical German coming into this organization that is very innovation driven, very unusual, no of very little hierarchy, at least the employees. And so a lot of things were very different from Germany. I think over the over the years, I changed a lot with that.
Hans:But the one thing that I think sticks out with me a little bit into what I changed is in the remember the peer review guidelines? There's one sentence in there that always fascinated me because I thought it actually hits the nail on the head. It says, is resilient and unfazed by ambiguity or changes in strategic direction? And that to me summarizes a lot of the space SpaceX tellers. They have resilience.
Hans:They're unfazed when when there's, like, unclear direction. Just sort it out. They figure it out. And they they don't get frazzled by changes in strategic direction because sometimes you just have to do that. And that's something to do that is something that I definitely learned doing at SpaceX.
Jeff:To roll with whatever came up.
Hans:It sounds, I don't know, you can, yes, you can say it in a way that it actually doesn't sound good, but actually what it means is just make the best out of what you have.
Jeff:Yeah, don't I think the ability to make those changes is definitional for organizations that are agile, one thing. Yeah. And especially agile with a strong focus. I feel that the focus on going to Mars was always there, but what we were doing tactically on any particular day could shift. The tactical goal was was always, something that was up for change.
Hans:Definitely. And it's part of Elon's strategy too to push something with a very narrow focus, and then if it doesn't work, abandon it and push something else with a very narrow focus. And just following that was something that people had to learn at SpaceX sometimes.
Jeff:Yeah, that's true. And I think that is part of the definition of why I ended up not there, that the narrow focuses were shifting, and I wasn't necessarily shifting fast enough with the focuses to satisfy the people that I was working for. And working for two people was always difficult. Did you feel like you worked for two people, or did you feel like you worked for one or none?
Hans:I mean, yeah, I guess in the end you do work for two people. And you're right. I mean, there is a filter in there. Right? Sometimes you have to filter or translate what Elon tells you to do so that people can embrace that and go in the right direction.
Hans:The raw message was often it would take people by surprise. It would it didn't come with an explanation. And so you had to basically frame it to say, here's why we do this, to get people motivated in the right direction.
Jeff:I like that. And I I really think that was the job of leadership at SpaceX of for certain kinds of leaders, was to be a little bit of a low pass filter and a translator
Hans:Yeah.
Jeff:For the team so that the team could focus long enough to get something done.
Hans:Exactly. Yeah. So, the other thing that was a little bit different was I knew Gwyn before SpaceX, yeah. And I was
Jeff:because you guys worked together at Microcosm, right? Gwen Shotwell and you?
Hans:Correct. Exactly. Correct. And I interviewed her at Microcosm. Was supposed to be my boss.
Hans:And so I kind of had a word there for that. I'm actually grateful for that. So I interviewed her at Michael Grossman. And then when I left, she was a little bit upset, I think, when I left. And I couldn't really bring her along right away because we had somebody else working business development.
Hans:I mean, that person didn't take the opportunity to work at SpaceX, let's say this way. Then I called Gwyn as soon as I knew this and told her, you've got to come over here. And she did. And I think there was Gwyn was always a friend. So for me, she was she was excellent in what she did and she was a great friend and she is a great friend.
Hans:And and so to me, this was totally natural. I didn't even think about this. But then it it changes your relationship to your boss basically. Right? I could tell things to Gwyn that other people probably could not say.
Jeff:And actually, I think that she deserves a lot of the credit for what we see now at SpaceX, for the longevity of the company and its ability to make the transitions that it's made. I don't usually see her in the headlines, and that's probably a good thing, but I do see her fingerprints all over it.
Hans:That's true. How
Jeff:long ago did you leave SpaceX?
Hans:September. It's four years and three months.
Jeff:And what led you to move on?
Hans:So I did do FAA work, part of my job in flight reliability. I think it was also partly because I just had the connections to the FAA and so on and so forth. Elon and I pretty much disagreed on an accident investigation. And he basically suggested, why don't you retire? And I did.
Hans:But I didn't actually do this right away. And we agreed I to that, worked another half year. I kind of phased it down. Mean, I had by that time, I had everything set up. I had a successor there, Bill Gershmeyer.
Hans:Had the team was running well. I was not ready to go to work on Starship. I felt that was too much for me. So that was clear too. We just had flown Bob and Doug successfully as human spaceflight, which I think was awesome to to get that.
Hans:Yeah. And so I thought it was the right time anyways. Yeah. So I went halftime at SpaceX as a senior adviser, whatever that means, and actually worked the other halftime at Sling aircraft on my airplane. And it was a it was an awesome it was an awesome mix because I literally worked three days at Sling and two days at SpaceX.
Jeff:When you say worked on your airplane, explain.
Hans:It's an experimental airplane. And and there's a build center, and and they help you building it, but but you can work as much as you want on on your own air on your own airplane, and they supervise you and help you, basically. And then that's a it's a very good thing if you want to build an experimental airplane and you're not sure you have the skills for that. So I bought I bought this kit, basically, and they put it in build center. I worked on it.
Hans:They they taught me how to do certain things. They fixed fixed everything I did when I wasn't there.
Jeff:And
Hans:and then the other the other half of the week, basically, I worked at SpaceX, and it was a really good transition.
Jeff:It sounds like it. Do you fly your plane a lot?
Hans:I wish. I flew a lot the first two years. I fly less now. But it's also winter here, so yeah.
Jeff:And what other things have you done since you left there? I know you've done some senior adviser roles at other places.
Hans:I think one of the first people that came to me after that was Chad Matt Khalid, who founded Vast. And it was kind of like a similar situation like SpaceX. He has a lot of money, puts some money on the table, wants to build it in something that has like a long term future, but no immediate or the difficult immediate economic situation, a space station. So I'm I'm an advisor for vast space for the space station there. And then this the second thing that happened is OHP in Germany reached out to me, Marco Fuchs, and I became a board member on the supervisory board.
Hans:And I I used to work with his father and with OHP and but I was still working in Germany. So those two things basically happened pretty early. Then I became an adviser to Stoke Space. They built a reusable upper stage. They actually built the whole rocket, but the the reusable upper stage is the thing that kind of tilted me towards them because I thought that was actually something that is one step further than SpaceX.
Hans:I'm a board member now at Stoke two. And then last but not least, I worked on I started working on a company called AstroForge. What does AstroForge do? They build interplanetary spacecraft for mining, asteroid mining, basically. There's many companies or not many, but there's there's a few companies that do that, but most of them actually make paper.
Hans:They actually build a spacecraft, and they're actually trying to get out to the asteroid, trying to rendezvous with it, and then they're trying to mine things and eventually get it back. So it's a pretty crazy concept in general, but I find it really refreshing that they're actually trying to do this.
Jeff:It sounds like you've been involved in a number of these startups that are still kind of exciting, and that you retain some excitement about what's going on in space. Is that safe to say?
Hans:Yeah, that's safe to say.
Jeff:And you think that there's still I guess that I came from a satellite position. I'm looking at what's happening in satellites and I look at Starlink. They're building hundreds of these things every day, launching thousands of them a year. Okay, problem solved. But you're looking at space and seeing that there's still exciting problems ongoing, and you're trying to contribute to that.
Hans:Yeah, I hope so at least. Talking about Starlink, mean this whole thing goes to Starlink. I have Starlink here at the house.
Jeff:I don't yet. Possibly my first interview via Starlink.
Hans:Oh.
Jeff:I still have my cable and it's still working, so I haven't gone for Starlink yet. But it has been an amazing kind of technology to watch it advance, especially coming from groups like we did that sort of hand built satellites.
Hans:It just works. I mean, it's just like you put it up on the roof one day and connect it, and it works. And I haven't taught it, I haven't touched it since then. And do a knock on wood, it used to work fine.
Jeff:That was certainly my experience of it. I took it out to a cabin that had no electricity and no running water and no internet. And you throw it outside on the porch and you have internet. And how did you end up, like I almost forgot, how did you end up doing what you did a couple weeks ago, going to space?
Hans:Oh, going to space. Totally random actually. I So I flew with Michi Benthouse. I met her, I don't know, like maybe two years ago. When I No, maybe maybe longer.
Hans:I think when I started at OHP, she contacted me and asked me, hey. I'm doing the zero g flight. I need funds for for travel, and so I see you on the board. Can you help them can you help me maybe that OHP contributes? And I just wanted to test OHP a little bit, and I just sent that over and said, hey, here's somebody.
Hans:Can you guys help her? And they did, actually. I actually proud of them. So they did, and she remembered that. And it's let's see.
Hans:What was oh, I met her later on, and then she asked me oh, I forgot to say. She sits in the wheelchair. Right. So she's paraplegic and can't book. And then she asked me, can she be an astronaut theoretically?
Hans:And then I said, well, no. Let me check and see. And technically, don't need the legs very much, at least. And so I kind of gotten to this thing. And then at one point, I just thought, well, sometimes you just have to do things to show that it actually works.
Hans:And that's when I decided we'd do this.
Jeff:That's a great genesis. I love the attitude as well. Sometimes you just have to do it.
Hans:Right. Exactly. I mean, it's like everything is there. Theoretically, it should work. I have the ability to do this.
Hans:I can do this. And so why don't I do that? I mean, and so that's how we ended up doing this. So, Michi has we we worked I worked with her basically a year until we flew. So I worked with her and with Blue.
Hans:We went twice to Blue Origin in Van Horn. We figured out how she gets into the cabin, how she gets out of the cabin. My job was basically if something goes wrong, have to somehow drag her out.
Jeff:How was it trusting yourself to somebody else's rocket after having spent so many years building rockets and then doing manned spaceflight? How did that feel?
Hans:A little bit weird. And the other thing was also I couldn't really ask point blank questions, right? I didn't want to be rude. And I also had a lot of cooperation from them. And I didn't wanna risk that by asking
Jeff:Right.
Hans:How the hell did you do that? And so it was a little bit weird that I kind of sometimes just looked at them with a question mark in my eyes, I guess. I think they they really tried to answer my question in in terms of reliability and and so on and so forth. And did ask some questions asked how how does how does this work? What happens when that fails?
Hans:And they asked them all right. I mean, they asked them all in the right with the right the right answer. And so I felt pretty comfortable, after a while. Yeah. It's a it's a real thing.
Hans:Right? You know?
Jeff:I'm sure.
Hans:But on on the other side, I also know that this whole thing has nothing to do with what you feel and what you do. It's really rockets have their own personality.
Jeff:And could you sense enough of the personality of that rocket? I mean, obviously, you could. It seemed like you felt confident.
Hans:Yeah. Yeah. I I did. I did. And and it was it was okay.
Hans:It was good. No. It was amazing. Yeah? I mean, reliability wise, I had enough information to to sit in there and and to go, and and I felt I felt safe.
Jeff:And what was the experience for you? I I think that, you know, I I don't necessarily expect much more than a Germanic answer, you know, it was a very amazing flight, but but did you you hear people who are utterly transformed by it, and I'm not necessarily expecting that was your experience, but what was your experience of going to space?
Hans:So it was definitely, it was wilder than I thought. Let's say it this way. It was definitely like an elevator that doesn't end. It's pretty it's pretty it's brute force. It goes up, and it doesn't end for, like, you know, several minutes.
Hans:And and then all the transitions, like the way the engine stops, stage separation, everything is pyros. So it's with a boom. And there's a lot of noise, you feel it. Some of it is harsh. And then and then this particular rocket goes straight up a 105 kilometers and comes straight down.
Hans:Right? So on the way up, think it feels like an like an orbital flight too. It's the same thing. What fascinates me is like at one point, the sky goes from blue to black. And it's it's pretty quick, actually.
Hans:And you look outside and and suddenly it's black and and it was it was blue before. So that's kind of like an amazing thing to see. Obviously, the view is the view is awesome. You see this view, the earth is a sphere and it's not it's not the window. Right.
Hans:That makes it a sphere. And then you come you come you have the zero g phase, and everybody floats around and and and does certain things. When you come back, the reentry is pretty harsh. That's five g. And because it's a belly flop, it goes straight in.
Hans:There's no flight path angle like what you normally have, and that increases the g loads but makes it also pretty short. And five g is a feel you feel that on your chest. It's like somebody sitting on your chest chest and keeps you from breathing. But it's short, so it's really not that much. And then comes the parachute, pre late, always.
Hans:I mean, same for everybody. Parachutes need to take air to work, and so they come out pretty late. And the landing is kind of rougher than I thought too. I mean, it's okay, but it's still on land. Yeah?
Hans:As a system that dampens it, like a thruster system that's going off at the same time. But it's still a pretty harsh event. But, I mean, all in all, this is a short, but you get a glance into something that is way bigger than you thought.
Jeff:I like that. Makes sense. Would it make you want to do it again?
Hans:Yes. I mean, pretty much everybody has that response when you come out, I want do this again. It was short. And it is short. Would I do it again?
Hans:I would I'd be interested in more, basically. Right?
Jeff:A space station trip. I
Hans:can do this for maybe a day. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Something like that.
Hans:So that sounds. But at the same time, I mean, it's also expensive.
Jeff:Has there been a demand for you to answer these same questions for a lot of people? Did you turn into a celebrity after going to orbit?
Hans:No. I mean, I some people reached out, but actually, I sit pretty much in the background. Mishi is the one that got hammered with requests and everything. And that's kind of what I wanted, actually. I didn't want her to work that much on that, but I did want to stay a little bit in the background and not make this about me, but about her, actually.
Jeff:I really respect that. I thought that that showed up immediately from the mission patch, which as far as I could tell Yeah. Did not carry any iconic Hans Koenigman icons.
Hans:Nope. I was thinking about the clover, but it was to Lakeview. The lucky clover. Lucky clover, right.
Jeff:Well, I'm really glad that you got an opportunity to do that. I think it's an excellent piece of punctuation on your career building rockets.
Hans:And then the other thing is also on satellites, you trust the rocket and everything is fine. But if you have somebody on there that you know, right? You go, is this really, really, really good? You're just asking things three times and not just once or twice.
Jeff:I can imagine. And then making that transition to going on somebody else's rocket and not really being able to ask those questions so deeply, I feel that you've had a very good set of experiences there. What are you thinking about doing next? Just flying your plane more, continuing your advisory roles, or do you have something else up your sleeve?
Hans:Yeah. Nothing nothing immediately, and I have a lot of energy still left, and I do wanna do wanna enjoy both my life, and at the same time contribute to space space, humanity, and all these things. So I'll see what I do. We have to talk probably again.
Jeff:I hope we'll talk again. I think that I was going to ask the quick round of questions, and one of them is, you know, do you think do you think we can help humanity?
Hans:I think we can. It's not totally clear how, And and it's often the things that where you take a risk.
Jeff:I agree. And what would you give as advice to younger people who are starting out their careers who want to get into this kind of high-tech pressure cooker?
Hans:By no means settle in your comfort zone. Just do do something on purpose to get out of your comfort zone.
Jeff:And did you have a sound bite of what your biggest lesson from SpaceX was?
Hans:The the SpaceX lesson is really complex. Right? There's there's so much into it because there's there's on one side a lot of self doubt is actually a good thing. Yeah? But at the same time, it's it's suspect this is suspect to back to basics, back to physics, try to really understand, to really understand.
Hans:It's always like asking question and so my my thing was basically what I come back with is always the question's more important than the Yeah. If you if you have the right questions, you pretty much solve the problem.
Jeff:Hey. I really appreciate you taking the time. You know, we go a long way back. Like like we said, it feels like it goes back to the nineteen eighties or the early nineties, and it's always good to catch up with you and I think people are gonna be very interested to hear what you had to say. And thank you so much for taking the time.
Hans:Thank you. Thank you and thanks for having me.
Jeff:You're welcome and we will come back and and do it again. I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Hunts. If anyone's qualified to say that rockets have personalities, it's him. And I'm pleased to say that for the first time since I started this podcast, I actually have a couple more episodes recorded, and they're being edited right now. In the coming weeks, you'll hear interesting discussions with both OG and newer generation SpaceXers.
Jeff:Thanks for listening to It's Not Rocket Science.