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Former SpaceX engineer Joel Brinton discusses breaking into the space industry, hanging upside down under rocket engines, sending his DNA to space, having lunch with Elon Musk, the risks of space faring (including exploding rocket engines), ADD, imposture syndrome, and learning from AI. And that one West Wing moment.
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?
Hi, and welcome to episode four of It's Not Rocket Science, the podcast in which I explore the trajectories of people who at some point in their careers have found themselves on planet SpaceX. Today, I'm talking rockets, risk, and artificial intelligence with one of the smartest, kindest people I know.
Joel:My name is Joel Brinton. Cool thing about myself is that I almost got blown up by a rocket engine.
Jeff:We'll get back to exploding rocket engine in a minute. But first, if you think there's only one way to become an aerospace engineer and serial entrepreneur, listen to Joel's journey.
Joel:Well, yeah. So, it was quite a journey. I'll briefly start at the beginning, which is, as a kid, I was very interested in electronics. I had a radio shack down the street, and I would try to go there once a week and pick out a few resistors or transistors, and I had a lot of their electronics kits, and I would I'd build little circuits. But, I never really did well at school, so I, you know, I was advised by a family friend to study business.
Joel:And, I thought, well, that's fine. And, so I actually ended up starting that business degree and finishing it because, it was a nice complement to my natural interests in engineering and electronics. I started building robots, quadruped, dog like, robots, which were fun. I could, show them off, and then I got involved with the Mars Society, and I'll take these robots to schools and do demonstrations for young kids. And then through that community, I got connected with a number of commercial aerospace companies.
Joel:The first one was XCOR Aerospace in the Mojave Desert.
Jeff:What was XCOR doing? I'm trying to remember.
Joel:Yeah. So they were working on a suborbital rocket powered aircraft, kind of like suborbital space tourism similar to, you know, spaceship one. It was a small team, about 30 people. But yeah. So I got an interview, for an engineering position through my contacts at the Mars Society.
Jeff:Even though you weren't an engineer?
Joel:That's right. Yeah. I don't know if there was a miscommunication. I got there. Lovely group of people.
Joel:Jeff Grayson, the founder CEO, gave me quite a bit of his time, almost two hours in a technical interview, and I just couldn't answer any questions. It was really embarrassing. He was like, okay. If there's a boat on the ocean and I put a boat in the boat and this boat's half full, what happens to the level of this boat? And I'm like, oh god.
Joel:I I don't even know where to start. But later on that afternoon, we go out to the hangar and they're doing some kind of flight operation. So they had just purchased an aircraft and they were doing some aerodynamic testing with it on the tarmac. And I just kinda ran out and helped them out. I pulled the aircraft in and they said they needed to disconnect the battery.
Joel:So I pulled the battery out, put it on the charger and chucked some sandbags under the wheels and that was it. The next day, they called me. Jeff called me, and he said, you know, Joel, we can't hire you as an engineer. You're you're clearly not qualified, but we just really, really loved your energy and really appreciated your help yesterday, we're wondering if you'd work for us as a lab technician. And I was like, yeah, sure.
Joel:That's great. Like, whatever. Let's do it. And so I moved up there a couple weeks later and found a little apartment in, you know, a drug den of lovely Mojave, California, for three hundred dollars a month, And, I just spent most of my time at work and that was really the beginning of my professional career, I'd say.
Jeff:So for sure, you wouldn't say that your career took some perfect trajectory like we'd recommend to a high school student?
Joel:Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, it's not even the half of it. I've had the least perfect trajectory you can imagine, a lot of challenges. Yet after all that forty years later, I am where I am, top of my field and what I do, having never actually gotten an engineering degree.
Joel:And so it can be done. A lot of the times, I I feel a little bit of impostor syndrome because I'm like, well, I I didn't go to Stanford for double e. I, you know, I don't have a master's degree, and yet here I am hiring people with PhDs and trying to, you know, design chips and build radios. And, sometimes I'm just like, you know, please tell me how this should work. But, you know, when I when I got to XCOR, it was an eye opener for me.
Joel:I actually almost got fired the first week because I didn't know what to do. I literally just sat at a desk and I brought in some of my own little projects and stuff and nobody told me what to do. And so I was just like, I sat there and I worked on some of my own stuff and I talked to people. Somebody took me out to lunch a week later and they're like, we're gonna fire you if you don't start doing stuff. And I'm like, oh my god, are you serious?
Joel:Like, what do I need to do? Give me something to do. Give me something to do. Right? And, Doug Jones is a brilliant rocket engineer.
Joel:He was like, okay. I just need you to clean up this worksheet. And I'm like, dude, you got it. I'm totally honest. And I just I swear to god, I made the world's best Excel spreadsheet, like macros and functions and beautiful graphs and everything with export functions.
Joel:You the next day I'm like, oh, it out, check out what I made. And he's like, holy crap, this is amazing. So that was the beginning of it. But also I was just really under skilled and so I realized that I had to level up. And a couple months prior, MIT started something called OpenCourseWare, and they published a whole bunch of their class videos and syllabi and, notes on this website, specifically for electrical engineering and applied mathematics.
Joel:I spent, like, $2,000. I bought all the books, and every single night, I went home, and I just religiously executed on that OpenCourseWare. Did all the courses. I did every single exercise problem. I sometimes emailed the professors and acted like I was a student and got some of my questions answered.
Joel:Within a year and a half, I had done most of the courses for undergraduate electrical engineering mathematics. Obviously, I got no credit for it, but it really paid off because later that year, XCOR had a downsizing and they had to fire their only electrical engineer. And Jeff came to me and he said, you're now our electrical engineer and he gave me a small promotion. And so, literally, I was like, well, I did the work. I don't have a degree, and now this guy just told me I'm the company's electrical engineer.
Joel:And so, you know, super unconventional, but that was that was my route.
Jeff:Why do you think they decided to hire you even though you couldn't answer the interview questions?
Joel:I mean, I'm just a really socially awkward guy, and I don't like just standing around. And I also like helping people, and I I try to be kind when I can. And I was just like, oh, these people need help. It was kinda like if you're in the supermarket and somebody drops something, you just go to help them, I kinda felt like that. I was just like, oh, these guys need help, let me just run out there and help them out and then there's more things to do and I just kept helping out.
Joel:There's no cooler place than hanging out on an airport and, you know, moving airplanes around, so I did what I could do because it was fun and cool and they're nice people and, but I think that kind of applies whatever you're doing. Like, if you if you wanted to get into a company and you don't have that opportunity to just, like, jump out on the tarmac and put a battery on the charger, you know, you can do other things, offer open source solutions people like, hey. You know, I made this, like, open source project which may help your company out, and you can just, post it on Git or something.
Jeff:And you figured that Jeff at XCOR just spotted that commitment and took the risk.
Joel:Yeah. I mean, also, they paid me, like, literally minimum wage, you know, for for the amount of hours I worked. It was it was, you know, question questionably legal, and I didn't care. So I think he in his calculus, he's like, this is basically free to me, and this guy, you know, seems very nice and very motivated. I was actually in the bathroom at x school one time, and there's, like, a window to the outside, and I heard people talking about me.
Joel:And they said, what do you think about that Joel kid? And somebody said, man, that guy's got ADD, but he sure knows how to use it.
Jeff:Yeah. That could be the motto of a lot of engineers I know, including my own kid. ADD is no blockage to being a great engineer. How did you end up moving on from Mexico to SpaceX?
Joel:I went to LA for, like, a SpaceX talk. Steve Davis was giving a talk at a public library, and he took a group of us to see the Falcon one. And it was just the coolest thing ever. I mean, it was like this is like everything that XCOR is doing, you know, 100 x. They act you know, have real rockets that are really trying to go to space.
Joel:Quick quick side note, I was able to lick the Falcon one rocket on my way out.
Jeff:So we know that you sent your DNA into space.
Joel:I did. Hopefully hopefully, it made it. Yeah. And so Steve was great, and he's like, yeah. Let me put you in contact, with the avionics department.
Joel:And I had a couple of, you know, rapid fire interviews, you know, went back on-site for a couple days, I think. Probably had, like, 15 interviews or something like that. And they said, listen. We can't hire you as an electrical engineer. I know you're an electrical engineer at XCOR, but you don't have a degree, but we'll hire you as a PCB designer.
Joel:You know, I paid 50,000 a year, and I was like, well, you know, that's fine. Like, my first day was the same day as the first successful Falcon One flight, and I didn't know it at the time, but if that had failed, that would have also been my last day, because I guess the the company was was hinging on it.
Jeff:Yeah. Most likely was. I was in denial because I'd moved my entire life from England just to work at SpaceX, and I didn't wanna think it was about to go out of business. I guess you brought good luck.
Joel:Maybe maybe just some DNA.
Jeff:Well, there's that. Did you do PCB design your whole time at SpaceX?
Joel:Okay. So that's how I got hired. And then I think two days later, you actually sent me to Wake Up because, there's a engine controller on the stand that needed some debug. And, you're like, you wanna go? And I'm like, yeah.
Joel:Sign me up. So I went and jumped on a plane, I think, two hours later or something like that. Something ridiculous. Like, I literally went home, put a few things in a bag, and just went to LAX. You know, the next day, I was literally hanging upside down in a harness underneath a rocket engine, plugging in a JTA cable to an engine controller, and then trying to debug it.
Joel:And I I stopped for a minute, and I was like, is this real? Like, how did I get here? I was literally delivering pizza, like, three years ago. It was just the coolest thing ever. And I I came back, and I remember you and Brandon pulled me aside, and they said, we need a responsible engineer, an Ari, for the stage controller.
Joel:How would you like to do that? And I was like, man, that that's great. Sounds great. And so that's, you know, typically an engineering role, and so I just kind of considered myself as a SpaceX avionics engineer ever since then.
Jeff:It would be tempting to say that Joel was smart and lucky, but I think there's more to it. He's also kind, helpful, and as you'll hear, 100% dedicated to advancing his skills and knowledge. It seems like if you started out hanging upside down under a rocket engine, that's a pretty good SpaceX story to begin with. Did you have a, like, quintessential SpaceX moment?
Joel:You know, I actually did. In the first couple weeks that I was there, there was a conversation I was having between, I think, me, Katrina Chambers, Brandon Pierce, and Jurg, walking down the aisles of cubicles, talking about a new design for the thermocouple board. And I remember thinking that this is the first time in my life that I've literally engaged 100% of my brain. They're the smartest and kindest people you could possibly imagine. I was just I was so impressed by their focus and their ab initio understanding understanding of of everything.
Joel:Everything. It was something out of, like, the West Wing, you know, where everyone's, like, walking really fast and talking really fast. Kind of ever since, I've just been looking for those those moments walking around, talking fast with extremely brilliant people.
Jeff:I love the West Wing comparison. Yeah. Did you interact with Elon at all, or were PCB designers, like, off in some corner that Elon couldn't find them?
Joel:Maybe a year into my my journey there, I was sitting and eating lunch in the cafeteria with some friends, and Elon just came over and he said, hey. Can I have lunch with you guys? And I'm like, yeah. Sure. Come on.
Joel:Sit down. And I remember, like, looking at everybody else, and everybody else was, like, super embarrassed, and, like, they they just didn't say anything. But I'm just, like, I'm nervous, and so I'm just, like, chatting. And so I was just, I fully engaged him, and we had this, like, twenty minute lunch together. I remember the the subject of discussion, which is very ironic now, which was free speech.
Joel:Of course, fifteen years later, I'm like, holy shit. So he struck me as obviously one of the smartest people on the planet. You know, he always knew about what you're working on, which I was like, how the hell do you know what I'm working on? And so much more. He knew so many different disciplines and it struck me as very interesting.
Joel:But interpersonal wise, he was just a normal person, just a little socially awkward and of acted like everybody else. He didn't stand out as somebody specifically charismatic or anything else. I enjoyed my time with them. Certainly, my entire time there, considered him a good leader and very smart and didn't have any issues.
Jeff:Did you say that you almost got blown up by a rocket engine?
Joel:Yeah. It wasn't at SpaceX. It wasn't. That was a company that was putting a a rocket engine on an airplane. We are doing some some testing called a tie down test, which is, tie the aircraft down to the runway, you fill it up with fuel, and then you run the engine for the full duration while you take data on the, performance, the temperatures and the pressures.
Joel:And everything know, we had done this 50 times and everything was going fine. And I was standing in front of the wing of the aircraft with a laptop, and all of a sudden, I just heard this bang. And then just, like, cryogen gas went everywhere, and, like, there were sirens and lights going off. There's a call on the on the loudspeaker, evacuate the area. My friend was sitting in the pilot seat, and so I helped him out, pulled him out as quickly as I could, and, we got the safety.
Joel:And later on, I had looked at my laptop and because I first thing I noticed was my my laptop screen turned off. And a couple hours later, I went back to the to the scene, and there was shrapnel in the back of my laptop. So the laptop had protected the the shrapnel from from going in my body. It wasn't much. I think it was maybe just some screws or something like that.
Joel:But, basically, the engine just let go. It was a 1,500 thrust pound liquid oxygen liquid methane engine that just decided to let go about, 10 feet from me.
Jeff:How did that affect you?
Joel:You know, it was just, a very surreal moment. I didn't really feel one way or the other. We had lost friends in, you know, the commercial aerospace industry. Spaceship one had been lost, and other people that we knew had been killed. And this company had a very strong safety record, and we never thought something like this would happen to us.
Joel:But it's just a reminder, that you can never never really be safe enough.
Jeff:Yeah. And all of the companies in aerospace say safety is job one, but it does take a real safety culture to implement that.
Joel:Yeah. I'm I have mixed feelings on this because safety culture is important, but safety can also kill a company. Like, you can just, you know, be as safe as possible and never launch. I always say that the safest engineer is a competent engineer. I don't think you could build a space faring civilization without taking some risk.
Jeff:And do you think that's a cavalier attitude?
Joel:It's a personal decision. Right? Like, everybody has a risk reward profile. And I think people who have stronger, you know, reward profiles than I do should be allowed to carry on. I think the issue becomes when you hire somebody and as as an employer employee relationship, you have an obligation to protect them.
Joel:But I think if somebody's like a business owner or just an entrepreneur and they have a particular risk appetite, I wish that, you know, there was more of an opportunity for for people to to, you know, build cheaper and better hardware.
Jeff:I happen to agree with you, and I think it is important if we're gonna build a space faring civilization just like it was when we built a seafaring civilization.
Joel:Yeah. There's gonna be death. I mean, when people go to Mars, there's people are a lot of people are gonna die, and we need to be okay with that. We need to make sure that, you know, everything's fully disclosed and that the people who are getting into this have full knowledge of what they're getting involved with. But I think I'll be really upset if, like, a couple people die on Mars and that squashes any upcoming missions or something.
Joel:That that would be disappointing.
Jeff:How did you end up moving on from SpaceX?
Joel:Well, I'll tell you. It all started out with a performance review, actually. I had, been a 100% committed, to SpaceX for about two years. I worked literally 16 a day, sometimes seven days a week. And it wasn't like I felt like I had to.
Joel:It was just like, why would I do anything else when I could be building rockets? Like, this is the coolest thing I could possibly do. The company was, you know, becoming more formalized, and we implemented performance reviews. And I remember going in for my performance review, and I got a b plus, and I was pissed. Because I was like, are you for real?
Joel:I sleep six hours a night, and every waking moment, I'm here. Like, how how is this a b plus? How is this, like, not a triple plus or something like that? And it's just a kind of realization that, oh, yeah. This is a company, and people are getting paid in exchange exchange for their time.
Joel:And so after that performance review, I started treating it more as a job. And I actually started a a business in the evening, and I had rented out a little office, right before the the cafe
Jeff:Mhmm.
Joel:The airport cafe.
Jeff:Yeah.
Joel:Howard Howard Williamson and I rented that out to start our own companies. And I had started a software company I was working on, FMEA software. So that was kind of the beginning of my exit, and then I think a couple months later I left.
Jeff:When you left, what was your planned trajectory versus the trajectory that you ended up on?
Joel:Yeah. So the the FMEA company was one idea. I actually even raised about $50,000 for it, but it didn't go anywhere. I ended up giving the money back to the investors. But I I I probably had a dozen startup ideas that really went nowhere.
Joel:But my biggest success after I left SpaceX was a PCB design consulting company I started called Brinton Engineering, and I opened myself up for PCB design consulting on, you know, some of the most advanced PCB designs that were being done in robotics and, you know, aerospace. And that was probably, to date, my most successful business ever. We were doing a couple million dollars a year in revenue. I had a lab with some of the most advanced debug equipment you can imagine. And I ran that for about five years, and I had about 50 clients.
Joel:So I kinda worked equally as hard, you know, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week sometimes. And after about five years of that, I really felt like this can't be it. Like, I need to get out of the rat race, and I wanted to move from being somebody who, like, does actual work to somebody who owns a business. And so I had a very interesting technical idea for something called a distributed beamforming radio network. The gist of it is that I could offer a last mile wireless service at much lower prices than you could with, like, say, a cellular network or even a wireline network.
Joel:And so it was really a trillion dollar idea, and I pitched it to investors, and I was able to raise $10,000,000. So that company was called Signal Laboratories. I had a couple of cofounders, and I ran that for about three years. And we were trying to design this modem, but we we were achieving technical milestones about 10 times slower than we had originally forecasted. So I kind of raised about 10 times less money than I needed.
Joel:And, you know, eventually, we we ran out of money, I had to close that.
Jeff:Did somebody pick up the technology and the idea?
Joel:So it you know, for me, it was a very challenging period. As the CEO and cofounder, I was receiving about a 101 different opinions. You know, investors would tell me to do one thing. Advisors would tell me to do another. The lawyers would tell me to do another.
Joel:The cofounders would tell me to do another. And it was just kind of like decision paralysis. We were running out of money, and I I thought I had informed the investors about this. I said, you know, if you don't give us more money, we're gonna close down. And, know, I I didn't receive any more money, so I closed down, and then I told the investors that I closed down, and they're like, what are you doing?
Joel:Like, don't close down. And I'm like, well, then we like, literally, the I've already let everybody go. Like, we need more money, like, today. If you don't want me to close down, we need more money today. And they're like, well, let me work on it.
Joel:Anyways, I said, if it doesn't happen by today, I'm out. And so I was, but one of the investors and another cofounder picked up the idea, and they ran with it for another year. But I don't believe they had any traction. So at this point, the code was open sourced. Investors agreed to open source it.
Joel:There's not much there without probably a million hours more engineering, but it's a good start. And, you know, we didn't disprove the concept, and I still think that there is some validity in building a distributed coherent reforming network, but it's gonna take a lot more time and money if if somebody's gonna ever do it.
Jeff:Did you come out of that thinking that you wanted to be CEO again and wanted to found something, or was it a lesson that you preferred to do engineering?
Joel:I think in the long term, I I do enjoy being the CEO founder, but I would keep the organization very small. I don't think I would enjoy having a company more than 15 or 20 people because at that point, everything gets so abstracted away, and you're just dealing with people who deal with people, which sounds like the opposite of fun. And I think for me, all of the interesting engineering projects that I could possibly do, I don't need billions of dollars. I need millions of dollars, and that's something that's achievable with, you know, a very small company.
Jeff:And what do you think you'll chase after next?
Joel:I'm I'm pretty, rigorous and formal about my interests and and hobbies. So I act I've actually documented 32 different personal projects of mine. I used to think that I would never accomplish all 32 of those things in my lifetime, but really in the last twelve months, everything's really changed with AI. And so I'm actually more encouraged than ever now that I might actually get all 32 projects done in my lifetime. But I think instead of focusing directly on those projects, I'm probably, unfortunately, gonna have to focus for the next couple years on this intersection of AI agents and engineering services.
Joel:I did incorporate a few months ago with another cofounder, a brilliant buddy of mine who's a digital designer, and and we're looking into different ways where we can potentially augment portions of the engineering workflow using agents to both kind of make money, but then potentially to also achieve some very interesting ends.
Jeff:So you don't see AI as a passing fad?
Joel:I mean, is like the nineteen eighties all over again where, you know, there's the introduction of the personal computer, and everybody goes from using pencil and paper to typing. Anybody who's not incorporating AI into into their workflow is just gonna be doing things with pencil and paper and just won't be able to keep up. So I'm excited about having this leverage, like, being able to take my love of engineering and multiply it by some, you know, coefficient using generative AI tools, but I just I don't know what that looks like. And so I'm just spending all my time right now fig figuring out what the future looks like, really. We're kind of in a transition right now.
Jeff:So this for you is the fundamental engineering tool of today?
Joel:Yeah. Exactly. The majority of my life, like, literally, tens of thousands of hours have been spent in software tools, primarily this tool called Altium Designer. I just spend my whole life in it just clicking buttons, opening menus, and moving wires, and setting parameters. And this is how I achieve things.
Joel:This is how we design circuit boards and build products. And I feel that, like, it's just limited by the rate at which I can, like, read menus and click. That's all about to change. I'm just gonna be able to think about the things that I wanna build and how they should be built and then just have the generative AI figure out how to implement that. And I'm not quite sure what that looks like yet, if it's gonna be all text based or if there's gonna be some, you know, graphical component that gets controlled by an agent.
Joel:We're still trying to figure all that out. But I think the days of people sitting at a computer opening menus is very limited.
Jeff:So you told me in your bio that you wanna live two hundred years and you're raising a young son. Now you're dedicating all your time to AI. What keeps you up at night?
Joel:What's after AI? That's what keeps me up at night. The future is very uncertain. Large language models are never gonna be worse than they are today, and I actually have a lot of fear and concern for people who know nothing about AI. You have humans that have zero marketable skills or skills that can be replaced with 10ยข worth of tokens, like, you've got some serious questions to ask as a society.
Joel:And, you know, that definitely keeps me up at night, you know, but it could go very it could go very good as well. I'm what they call an accelerationist. I think this is gonna be net positive. I mean, I spend every night, I put I put the ChatGPT app on auto on audio mode, and I just chat for an hour with an agent, and I'm learning at just an incredible rate. It's like when I was first introduced to Wikipedia, I just, you know, sat there for three months and just read every link I could find, and it's, like, the same thing.
Joel:I'm just having chats with these agents, and there's just, like, any question that I can have, they just answer it for me. It's just all at my fingertips, And I'm just like, what the fuck does the future look like, dude? It's gonna be so weird. There's a lot of pitfalls that we need to watch out for, but I think that this is gonna be good. We just have to really keep our eye on the ball right now.
Jeff:As much as I don't wanna cut this conversation short, I think that's a great time to do so. I'll go away and edit it and get it out there where people can hear it.
Joel:Thanks a lot. I've really enjoyed it.
Jeff:I wanna editorialize a little bit before I finish this up. One of my assumptions in making this podcast has been that early employees at SpaceX gained financially and then used their financial resources to follow their passions. Here's what Joel had to say about that.
Joel:When I started I was getting paid $50 a year and I didn't have enough money to buy my options when I left.
Jeff:So Joel left SpaceX without a financial windfall and what he told me was that it was all about the experience for him. And I think that's important because it's easy to say I couldn't do what he did because I didn't get the degree or I didn't get the money. And what we really see from Joel's story is that he turned his passion and intelligence and hard work into a lot of really interesting endeavors. So in future interviews I'm going to challenge my own assumptions and find out really what people took as the main benefit from their time at SpaceX. One additional bit of housekeeping is to say that artificial intelligence has actually helped the podcasting workflow.
Jeff:I can upload the podcasts, get a text transcript, and edit text and have those edits ripple through to the audio, which is kind of cool. So I've been able to turn this episode around in about two weeks, and that means we should hear some more episodes of It's Not Rocket Science coming up in the near future. Thanks for listening.