It's Not Rocket Science

Hosted by Jeff Ward

Technology

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Latest episode

Jun 2026

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About the show

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?

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10 recent

June 16, 2026Episode 1045 min

Tom Mueller - Employee Number One

Tom Mueller became SpaceX employee number one through a quirk of paperwork, and went on to design every SpaceX rocket engine from Merlin to Raptor, all because a high school math teacher asked him if he'd rather design airplanes than maintain them. In this episode, Tom and I discuss the role of optimism in project scheduling, the birth and evolution of Starship, and how Tom founded Impulse Space to create in-orbit mobility for the space economy. (00:00) - IPO Hot Take (00:59) - Becoming Employee One (03:42) - Betting on SpaceX when others failed (06:06) - The math teacher who changed everything (15:01) - Building Starship: simplification, methane & the last test flight (19:47) - Quintessential Elon moment: schedules (24:36) - Leaving SpaceX and starting Impulse Space (27:31) - Dragon & flying humans (29:37) - Building Impulse & the "true space age" (35:05) - Outside the rocket: the raise, racing & the magic lesson (40:34) - Making the world a better place: the space economy & philanthropy

June 2, 2026Episode 937 min

Bulent Altan - The Right Type of Challenging

Bulent Altan started his career at SpaceX in 2004, fresh out of Bob Twiggs' CubeSat lab at Stanford, joining the small team working on Falcon 1. He stayed long enough to put his technical fingerprints on every major SpaceX development. Now he's the founding partner at Alpine Space Ventures, a venture capital fund making hands-on investments in European space startups. Even as a VC, he "gets to do engineering every day." Listen in as we discuss everything from surviving the hot seat on Elon's jet to advice for angel investors.

May 19, 2026Episode 832 min

Krishna Pribadi - From Merlin to VO2 Max

Krishna Pribadi spent six years on the test stand at SpaceX in McGregor, Texas — Merlin 1D, the first OctaWeb, F9R Dev1, the first booster recovery, and finally Raptor. He left in 2019 and has since worked on cargo drones, traveled back to Indonesia to trace his family history, race-engineered in the Moto America Superbike paddock, and started a stealth-mode human-performance coaching practice called Tanaga Labs.We talk about all of it.

May 5, 2026Episode 742 min

Hans Koenigsmann - From Falcon 1 to the Kármán Line

Hans Koenigsmann: From Falcon 1 to the Kármán LineHans Koenigsmann was SpaceX employee #4 and the company's first VP of Avionics, Guidance, Navigation and Control, and later its chief engineer for launch and VP of Flight Reliability. He spent nineteen and a half years at SpaceX before retiring in 2021. In November, he flew to the Kármán line on Blue Origin's New Shepard alongside Michi Benthaus, the first paraplegic astronaut.Jeff and Hans first crossed paths in the small-satellite world of the 1990s — Hans in Bremen, Jeff at Surrey — before reconnecting when Jeff joined SpaceX as Hans was handing off avionics to focus on systems.In this conversation, Hans recounts the post-Falcon-1-Flight-3 meeting where Musk told a near-broke team they had six weeks to launch the fourth and final rocket. He explains why GNC at SpaceX owned its own hardware instead of writing specs and tossing them over the fence. He talks about pulling Gwen Shotwell into the company, scuba diving with Musk at Kwajalein, and the peer-review line that became his personal benchmark: resilient and unfazed by ambiguity or changes in strategic direction.And he describes what it's like to trust someone else's rocket — and what the ride felt like. A glance into something that's way bigger than you thought.

June 9, 2024Episode 629 min

Paul Mahacek - Climate is Hot Right Now

Entrepreneur and former SpaceX enginer Paul Mahacek speaks about his engineering career and his latest project AtmoCooling, which seeks to re-green coastal deserts. Along the way, we stop in France, California, Antarctica, and Kwajalein Atoll.

March 13, 2024Episode 527 min

Joel Brinton - That West Wing Moment

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.

November 15, 2023Episode 425 min

Edwin Chiu - Expect Failure

Edwin Chiu - Expect Failure by Jeff Ward

April 15, 2023Episode 336 min

Dolly Singh - Unicorn Herding

An interview with expert Unicorn Herder Dolly Singh about SpaceX, life after SpaceX, feminism, and the unifying power of technology. And plumbers are millionaires.

October 21, 2020Episode 225 min

Endless Playtime - Erin Gatling and Casey Schilling

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.