It’s Not Rocket Science
Boris Lipchin — Only Your Worst Day Matters
Highlights
The cold call (01:40)
Boris didn't wait for SpaceX to invent a flight software internship. He called the front desk.
"I called the front desk at SpaceX, and I said, if you guys have an internship program in flight software, I want to apply to be an intern. And if you don't have an internship program in flight software, I want to apply to be an intern anyways."
Read the Wikipedia article (05:29)
His welcome to the company came in his first week, from the manager of flight software.
"We had a meeting in flight software, and I asked a question, and famously, Mike Dabrowski looked at me and said, Boris, have you ever read the Wikipedia article for Rocket before? I said, maybe I haven't. He said, you should probably do that."
Spitting distance of the ISS (10:56)
On the C2+ mission, with Dragon holding below the ISS, the fix wasn't in any procedure.
"We had to send the command that wasn't part of any procedure. I remember just reading the actual literal flight code and making sure that the instructions within that command would do the right thing. Being allowed to do something like that within literal spitting distance of the International Space Station, and having the trust, was core to that mission achieving the success that it did."
Learning from success (14:18)
The lesson he carried out of SpaceX wasn't about rockets. It was about what you do after things go right.
"After every mission we do a month of data review, and even in the most picture perfect parts we would almost always learn something that we didn't understand about these incredibly complex systems we had built."
Overruled by Elon (18:28)
The navigation expert got overruled on navigation — and was impressed.
"I said, if we rebooted the flight computer the mission would be over, because we'd lose state that was irrecoverable in navigation. And Elon told me that I was wrong. I'm thinking, theoretically I should know more about the navigation system than almost anybody else in the company. And Elon actually presented an argument as to how you could recover it that made sense."
From Dragon to the human body (27:05)
Why a Dragon GNC engineer ended up in healthcare: the next hundred years.
"We don't actually know how the human body really works at all. We are guessing most of the time, our understandings are very surface. And I thought, wow, could we bring some of this first principles data-driven approach that we had at SpaceX to the human body and just measure things more — and could health become more than just absence of disease?"
GPS coordinates (33:40)
His diagnosis of why your lab results don't change anything:
"If you're trying to find your way to the local grocery store and I give you latitude and longitude GPS coordinates, that doesn't help you. You need a map. You need instructions that are contextualized to you. And a lot of healthcare is just giving out GPS coordinates."
The takeaway (43:10)
The takeaway.
"We have to pull a lot of rabbits out of hats to solve these fundamental problems. I have two girls, and for them to grow up in a world where they can be safe and be happy and live long, happy lives, I think we have to do a lot of work. But that's why we do what we do."