Transcript

One of the perennial challenges faced by high performance engineering companies is finding skilled engineers who can also lead and manage people. My friend, Tim Buzza, is one of those rare folks. I think Tim was amongst the best technical leaders I ever met, and our conversation for It's Not Rocket Science will illustrate why.

Tim: I mean, I think that was my greatest accomplishment at SpaceX was the people and getting the greatest people in and letting them just show us what they could do.

Jeff: Tell me your name and also in in your case, not what your favorite food is, but what was the call sign that you most often used on Launch Net?

Tim: Okay. My name is Tim Buzza and affectionately known as TB at SpaceX. I had many different roles on different networks during testing and launch. And as you if you've worked in the launch industry, we tend to unfortunately come up with some acronyms to shorten things almost like the aviation industry. So normally, the top of the food chain was the launch director, at least on launch day other than CEO of the company, for example, Elon.

But, launch director was LD, launch conductor was LC, Prop one, AVI one. You remember all those fun acronyms. True.

Jeff: I I think I remember you mostly as LD.

Tim: I was mostly LD, but I also tried to hand off that baton as as early as I could. Same thing at the test site, the test director TD, I tried to hand that off. And but my generic term for all the SpaceXers tended to be TB.

Jeff: I I it's interesting to me that you mentioned immediately that you tried to hand things off as soon as you could because I always respected that. And when I was trying to cook up an introduction to this episode, I I mentioned that I I really respected your leadership and tried to emulate it because you were able to and willing to hand things off as soon as you could. And you corrected people when they needed correction, but you gave them the latitude to do as much as they could as quick as they could.

Tim: Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think that was my greatest accomplishment at SpaceX was, the people and getting the greatest people in and letting them just, show us what they could do.

Jeff: It's really a credit to you that that's the way that you worked because not everybody was able to work that way. How how did you end up at SpaceX in the first place? I mean, by the time I got there, you were there, and everybody who's already there, you think, has been there forever, but I'm sure that that wasn't the case.

Tim: No. I gosh. I'll try not to go too far back, but I graduated from Penn State. I took a job at McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach because I just loved airplanes. I did love rockets, but airplanes.

And so I worked on all variants of McDonnell Douglas airplanes from, m d eighties, m d eleven, c seventeens, things like that. And then Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas and began shutting down the aircraft side in Long Beach. So I moved to Huntington Beach, and that's where I started working on rockets. It was the years that we were developing the Delta four for the air force, and I got to work with a guy named Chris Thompson. And then after about five years, the development was winding down.

They were moving towards operations at Cape Canaveral. And Chris came to me in the spring of two thousand two and said, I'm leaving Boeing. I'll call you in a few months to talk about some new stealth startup. And I went, okay. Goodbye, Chris.

I didn't quite know what that meant back then. It wasn't like you hear it today. But sure enough, in July, he called, and, I met him up in El Segundo on a Saturday to an empty warehouse with a whole bunch of big plans that they had. And, then Chris said, you gotta meet Elon. So I went in on Sunday, and Elon Elon and I had a great interview, just he and I there that afternoon.

And they were looking for someone to run rocket engine testing. So then I needed to interview with Tom Mueller. But Tom Mueller this was now Sunday night, so this gives you an idea of how SpaceX was already operating. Walked in for the first time Saturday, met with Elon Sunday morning, and I'm now interviewing for the job Sunday night. And Tom happened to be in Ireland, so he gets out of an Irish pub, and and then I was hired on Monday.

That's how I got to SpaceX.

Jeff: And did they have in mind what they had you what they wanted you to do? So it's basically engine testing at that time?

Tim: Yeah. They just said, hey. I'm gonna develop a 60,000 pound thrust locks kerosene engine, and we need you to build a test site from scratch and, help us, you know, bring it to qualification. And, the crazy thing is I've never tested a rocket engine in my life.

Jeff: But you just said yes and went for it.

Tim: Yep. I said, yes. This looks interesting. I'll figure it out.

Jeff: Where did you guys immediately do that testing originally?

Tim: Yeah. We started in Mojave because it's closer, and you can do energetic testing out in the desert. And we were testing the gas generator was the first component. So it had some simple, aircraft igniters and simple, and and then we so we were testing it out in the desert on a just a a rig with trying to think of the name of the company. We were in partnership with somebody out there to build the test rig, XCOR, with Jeff Greason, I think, was his name.

But then we quickly ran into negative declarations with the environment. We quickly ran into thrust caps of, like, 75,000 pounds. And so then we went off to look for a better place, and that's when we found MacGregor, Texas. It was an old naval weapons, testing center, and that's where we built the the SpaceX facility for all of our, engine and mechanical testing was done there.

Jeff: And that side is now one of the big hubs of SpaceX activity.

Tim: Yeah. I it's still awfully busy, I'm sure. I think the center of the energy at SpaceX is obviously down at Boca Chica Starbase, but I think the hive of activity that's going on in at MacGregor must be amazing.

Jeff: You moved on from the engine testing into numerous other roles. Like, by the time I met you in 2007, you were already taking responsibility for launch ops, if I remember, and all of mainly, almost everything that happened off-site.

Tim: Yeah. So, yeah, obviously, when I first hired in, I worked for Tom as director of test operations. I didn't know that that was gonna lead me to MacGregor, Texas ten days on, four days off, for many years. My younger daughter was only about two. She only had a few words, mommy, daddy, kitty, but she did used to be able to say, hate Jeremy because every Monday morning, Jeremy Holman would come to my door, and then her dad would disappear for ten days.

And, so she had a real negative feeling about Jeremy Holeman. But after that, we obviously need to go launch the rocket, and Elon quickly figured out or not figured out. He quickly realized that a a launch site is very similar to a test site. We have the same propellants, propellant line, same comm, same command and control. We had already been testing the engines and the stages and everything in MacGregor, so it seemed to make sense.

And, so then that's when I got promoted to VP of test and launch, which then gave me a seat at the at the, Monday morning staff meeting, which, as you remember, was 11AM to 1PM every Monday, nonstop, never changed the entire fourteen years I was at SpaceX.

Jeff: And that Monday morning meeting was an intense meeting. And and my story about that meeting is that my last day at SpaceX, I got a text during that meeting that said Elon and Gwen would like to meet with you at lunchtime at 12:30. And I texted you under the table. Know, I sent you a text. I said, Oh, isn't this interesting?

Am I going to get fired? And you texted back to me. He said, isn't it disrespectful, you know, that we always think whenever we're going to have a meeting with the bosses that it means we're like out the door? And I just laugh at that in hindsight because you were right and I was right, you know?

Tim: Yeah. I mean, there was some anecdotal sayings we said that weren't always great, but, like, some people would say like, if you call and say my, my email stopped working, then IT would say, we'll send security up to fix it.

Jeff: And, also, people were like people, they they learned they were no longer at the company because their name no longer showed up in the internal directory.

Tim: Yes. But I have had employees send an email out to the company, and then they would send me an email saying, Tim, I think I made a mistake. Do you think I'm gonna get fired? And I had to send them an email back saying, I'll be right up to help you pack your desk. You know?

I'll walk you out just so you don't have to be ushered out by security.

Jeff: Yep. And, you know, from you know from the the perspective of years that a lot of people there's not a lot of people who are there when the the day that I walked in who are still there now. It's just that kind of a workplace. It's an intense workplace that requires a lot of you and that, you know, also is evolving continuously.

Tim: Yeah. For sure.

Jeff: Anyway, what came next after you got invited to the executive meeting?

Tim: You know, I always was trying to hand off jobs, but then on the other side, Elon kept handing me more jobs. And so the the next step was we needed to do production at a higher rate. Once again, I'd never run production, but he asked me to do it. So then I was VP of test launch and production.

Jeff: That's a huge portfolio.

Tim: Which was a pretty big role. And, you know, that's when we were just turning from where the the development groups were running production like avionics, propulsion and structures. And so now we were, you know, trying to stand up a production organization that that our goal was to build 40 cores, twenty second stages, 12 fairings, and six dragons every year with a thousand people in a five five hundred thousand square foot factory. And so that presented quite a challenge. I eventually handed that role off to Andy Lambert, who you remember came from came from England running the Mini Cooper.

At that time, you know, Elon was ramping up production at Tesla, so we thought having somebody come out of the car industry to to bring higher production rate mentality and people was helpful, which it was. I mean, Andy did an amazing job. And then after that, I did lose, test for a while. Tom Mueller's team took it over for a couple years, and then they gave it back. So I think at the very end, it was VP of test and launch again.

Jeff: But somewhere in there, you also stood up, like, what, launch sites at Kwajalein at The Cape and at Vandenberg.

Tim: Yes. In the order of operations, we went to Vandenberg first with the Falcon one. We were on SLIC 3 West. We did a static fire, and the NRO realized we actually had a rocket that could make fire and would potentially launch. They had a billion dollar satellite down the hill at SLIC six, and they decided that it was not a good idea for us to launch and potentially risk their asset.

So I was on the call with Elon when not the range commander, but the head of NRO said, you will not launch till we launch. So Elon said, okay. Didn't really push back because I don't think it was a winnable situation. Then he got off that call and called me and says, alright. Move the entire launch site

Jeff: to Kwaj. Yeah.

Tim: Affectionately known as Kwaj. It's Kwajolin Atoll. It's the army, base that, really was established after World War two. So we built a launch site at Vandenberg, and then we took it apart and shipped as much as we could to Kwajalein. We did all the Falcon one stuff there.

We thought about doing Falcon nine. I'm really glad we didn't. And then, of course, we moved to Cape Canaveral. We acquired SLIC four, which was a heavy lift pad that had all the concrete flame duct electricals. So it was a great start.

And then, of course, we needed a West Coast launch site, then we developed, Vandenberg. That was all launch stuff. But also one of the one of the great things that was a challenge was setting up mission control, which your team

Jeff: Yeah.

Tim: And my team were heavily involved with, because of the nature of software and and the interaction with the vehicle. So certainly with, people like John Kolores and setting up mission control with your team was was super exciting.

Jeff: I feel like Kwajalein, the logistics of Kwaj were about as far stretched as you'd ever wanna be. It's in the middle of nowhere, and getting there was virtually impossible.

Tim: Yeah. There was very few flights, only twice a week on flights out of LA. You had to stop in Honolulu and then and then into Kwajalein. A boat left once a month, and so we had to be very strategic on, you know, pack your supplies and check it twice. We did have our own airplane, the Falcon 900, strangely named.

And, but, you know, we did things like we were always in a hurry. And, of course, we found out that if you needed something in the hurry with the army, you could put a red sticker on it called 999. And they did bring in army flights on DC eights and things like that. So we overwhelmed their system for a couple years with a number of 999 requests. It's a little red tag.

We actually made T shirts with it, but that backfired a bit because we would walk around the island with our nine nine nine T shirts. And, around one Christmas, we blocked all the Christmas trees and the Christmas stuff from coming because we nine nine nine the cargo load out. So all the moms and families were pretty upset with us, so we just

Jeff: feel that that place not that that we could dwell on Quad for the whole discussion, but by the time I was at SpaceX, it had become a kind of legendary posting that people were isolated out there, but they did seem to love it in some ways.

Tim: Yeah. I think it's, you know, kinda like a little bit of, lord of the flies. You kinda got away from the mothership, and then we had this place that had some rules. And then it had the challenges, and it had sort of you're out in the middle of the South Pacific. You had the army.

We had our effectively our own island on Omulek. It seemed to have its own different government, within itself. And so, yeah, it had that lure. It was hard work, but, I don't I don't think I've ever heard of anybody that went there say that it was a negative experience.

Jeff: That's for sure. It was quite an experience to be out in the middle of the Pacific and see that island pop up when you're flying in the plane out in the middle of the blue. The whole thing pops up, and suddenly, there's a little miniature civilization out there.

Tim: Yeah.

Jeff: When you'd you know, obviously, you were one of the early people. You met Elon. You worked directly with Elon. Do you have a quintessential Elon story, or is it is it every story is is quintessential?

Tim: I I know people love Elon stories. I I think for me, I had so many really amazing interactions, but I I I could share two, I think, that are pretty good. And, so the first one would be experiencing the high of getting Falcon Falcon one flight one off the pad and just seeing it airborne after how long we've been working since 2002. This was now 2006. And then, of course, thirty seconds later, it shut off and fell back to the reef and exploded, and so that was the low.

About thirty minutes after that accident, Elon, Chris, Tom, Hans, and I jumped into a helicopter, flew out to Omulek. It looked like a war movie. Our dreams were literally scattered everywhere. But that night, Elon joined the team at the snake pit, and, like, he was he was, like, really there

Jeff: for us. And that and and at that point, he was like, we'll just have to keep going.

Tim: Yeah. I mean, you could have he could have reacted in many different ways, but, he he accepted the success of getting to that far and getting through a countdown and getting a rocket airborne and and then just redirected our energies to, you know, figuring out what went wrong and and, getting to the next flight. So that that was, an amazing experience. Another one to share will involve you a little bit more. I thought that would be interesting.

But, again, it seems to be always the the flight one. So this was Falcon nine flight one in June 2010. This was now your rocket, your avionics. Correct? Yep.

And so we had thunderstorms the day before, as always, is our luck, and the telemetry got ratty. And so that night, we lowered the rocket, and we're all out on the launch pad, Elon including included. And Bjorn's up there in a ladder blow drying the the

Jeff: The antennas.

Tim: Yeah. The antennas, trying to dry them out and adding some silicone, and and then we said, yep. That should do it. This ended around 02:00 in the morning.

Jeff: Yep.

Tim: And then Elon needed a ride back to his hotel. And so the whole way back, my brain's thinking, gotta get up in four hours. All the things we have to do to successfully launch a Falcon nine. And all he wanted to talk about was the Falcon Heavy, reusability, flying humans, and getting to Mars. And so it was about a forty minute ride, and I got to hear the whole SpaceX plan for the next fifteen years between probably 02:30 and 3AM.

But nonetheless, the next day when we finally got into the the telemetry checks with the range, it it didn't have the right, really, feedback that we wanted. It wasn't off or on. It was just not great. And I remember us all talking on the anomaly net, and we're like, boy, why would we risk valuable telemetry on the first flight of this brand new rocket? You know, it can get people may not realize you can have that fail, and we can get all the way to orbit.

And somebody else can tell us what orbit we're in, but we would not know much more than that. It would just be like a zero or a one. But I remember Elon listened, and then we were on the anomaly net. And then Elon just said, telemetry will be fine. Continue with the countdown.

And and we all were at the point where once he takes responsibility for something with all the facts, then then that's a shared responsibility, and that was a big lesson you had to learn in working with Elon. And, of course, we finished the countdown, got off, I think, quite well. We launched, got telemetry for the flight, and we got to orbit. So that was a real real experience.

Jeff: It really was. And the thing that I remember is that I told him, I said, I don't you know, this telemetry might or might not work. And he said, doesn't sound like a problem to me.

Tim: Exactly. That was I was on the net with you, and I had learned that once he says to carry on, you and I'll tell you, I never heard one more word about telemetry the rest of the countdown. The team focused on everything else.

Jeff: True. And what were your expectations for that launch? Because that's the one I was the most intimately involved with, I think. And my my sincere hope was that it got far enough off the range before anything happened that there was no video of whatever happened.

Tim: Yeah. We used to have a grading scale. You know, an f was blowing it up on the pad. Maybe that was a d. Something worse was an f.

Anyway, we had different grades. You know, a c was getting off the pad. A b was first stage. You know, b was lighting second stage, things like that, whatever, some grade. For me, not in a cocky way, but I felt like we'd done such a good job of taking all the right things from Falcon one into Falcon nine.

And we had even more expertise on board, and we did even more testing and more mission assurance than we ever had on any Falcon one flight. So I actually felt pretty good about it. I always knew, like everybody, that if something went wrong, it was gonna be something that we either didn't see during testing or something that we never tested like we fly, and we were just gonna have to learn something. And at that point, I'd felt if it fails, it's almost for sure gonna be on something that is forgiving, and and it'll be a learning point as opposed to failing on something we'd done before, which is awful.

Jeff: Yep. Yep. I was so pleased that that thing got to orbit. It was really quite an achievement and paved the way for a lot of what came in the future. Yeah.

I mean, it actually put us ahead of the game because we could see all the near misses, figure out what we had almost done wrong, and move on from there, which is a great pedestal to move on from.

Tim: Yeah. Absolutely. Like, I, the early yeah. Obviously, we had failures on Falcon nine that came later, but the fact to get so many successful flights in a row at at at the beginning, I mean, really anchored the program.

Jeff: Did you have other, like, quintessential SpaceX moments, or were that that that something that jumps into your mind as being the the SpaceX story that you that you love or that encapsulated the experience for you? Because your experience was so long that it's hard to boil it down, but I'm just curious if anything pops in your head.

Tim: Yeah. It's the crux move of SpaceX that people know by now. They didn't know it then. It would be, flight four of Falcon one. I mean, that is, like, the story.

But maybe a few things people didn't know. Flight three was extremely painful because we had all the right ingredients. We made one change with the rocket engine. We missed one change in a separation timing. And and and other than that, I think everything else was was highly reliable to get to orbit.

But the thing is right after that, we were in Kwajalein, and I thought, I'm I'm not even gonna be able to get home. Like, where am I gonna scratch up $1,800 to to fly back to The States? So we were more worried about how am I gonna get home. But we got on a call that evening, and Elon said, can scrounge up enough, and you guys have eight weeks, to to launch the next rocket, whereas we had previously done that in a year. So those are things that most people know.

But that required flying the first stage on a C17, which is a story amongst itself. But in our own SpaceX, like, saving money ways, we were loading the rocket on the plane, and we looked in, and there's, like, 30 jump seats in there. I'm like, oh, we can save on 30 airfares. Throw everybody on that plane because we already paid for it. So luckily, we had half our engineering, and technician team for the launch already on the airplane.

Of course, the stage crumpled on descent into Hickam. First of it was a faster descent than a commercial airliner because we had the weekend warriors flying the C17, and we hadn't gotten the correct vent area to equalize. And, luckily, the team said, go back up. You know, we know it popped back out. They, opened up some more vents, landed.

But for me, I got a call from my team leader, Anne Chinnery. It was about 03:00 in the morning, and her voice was trembling, so I knew something was wrong. Okay. Is anybody hurt? No.

We broke the rocket. How? And and everybody was like, Tim, what do we do? And I thought, well, I could have got on the phone with Elon or I could have whatever. I just said, keep going.

We don't have anything else we can do. Like, don't even tell me what else is wrong with it. Just keep going. And they were like, What? I go, "load it up at 8AM and fly all the way to Kwajalein, take it to Omalek, and we're just gonna carry on."

So that was leadership skills I learned from Elon. Like, I didn't have to figure everything out that night. I just had to tell everybody keep going. So Chris and I stayed back to get all the spare parts. There's a lot of stuff inside of a tank, as you know, like baffles and transfer tubes and and, you know, different things in the, sump, things like that.

So we'd broken quite a bit of things in there, but our tank was made of twenty two nineteen, which is actually pretty forgiving. And so it did collapse in like a Coke can, and it popped back out, but it didn't crack, even the welds in that tank. So that was the first good news. So at this point, I had the team you know, I said, hey. Draw us a timeline of repairing it, getting ready for launch.

And they came back and said, it's gonna take us five weeks. And we only had, like, two weeks to repair it. And I'm like, well, that's not gonna work. And I'm like, well, then now make me a list of all the things that are causing it to take five weeks. What we had found is that we had brought a lot more discipline to the team on procedures and inspections and quality and all these things, and so they were still operating under those assumptions.

So I actually think it was Chris Thompson. He said, alright. Knock all that off. Strip it like a Chevy. And when we put it back together, we're gonna have one technician and one engineer on every operation, and they're just gonna verbally sign off at the end of the shift.

So almost zero paperwork. And so that's what we did, and they got it done in two weeks. And then we actually which is crazy. We actually launched exactly fifty six days later, which is exactly eight weeks almost to the minute, which sometimes makes me think we're in a simulation.

Jeff: Right.

Tim: Doesn't seem possible for that coincidence. And, yeah, that that was really something to have experienced.

Jeff: It was a a wild ride. I got the same call at 03:00 in the morning from Bulent that the thing is broken, and what are we going to do? And it was a real panic. The few of us, you, myself, and Chris, were still back in California. And it was a morning to remember when we got in there, and Elon started to get his head around the problem and send people where they needed to be.

Tim: Yep. Yep. It was, actually, that was some of the best teamwork we we that we had in my tenure. We had a lot of good teamwork, but that was one that not just out of desperation. It was more just, I think, all the good and everybody came forward, not the bad.

Jeff: Yeah. And the reward came from it, which was also excellent. Yeah. For successful launch after all the after all the false starts. And as you said, then the flight 3 near miss was such a a hard one to take because you could see exactly what had happened.

And Right. Imagine that if you changed one number in one file, the whole mission would have been a success.

Tim: Yeah. That was a tough failure.

Jeff: How did you end up moving on from SpaceX? Like, you went from the Falcon 1 days to Falcon 9, Dragon. I don't know if you worked on Starship, but your tenure was long and successful from the outside and very demanding. It sounds like from the very beginning, you were away from family a lot, which couldn't have been easy.

Tim: No. I have an amazing wife, Joanne, known as Joji. Two wonderful kids. They were great. They supported me the whole time.

They accepted the situation. And so I couldn't have done it without them, of course. But, I was really getting kinda sick from some of the stress and the long hours. Wasn't exactly sure what was going on. But, at that time, we were finishing building, the heavy lift launch site at Vandenberg.

And so I had promised the team that definitely I'd be there to finish that and do the first Falcon nine one point one launch. So we both upgraded a rocket and then built a brand new launch site. So it was a lot of firsts once again, Falcon, you know, Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. Now we're doing the Falcon nine 1.1 at another brand new site. So, that was a pretty difficult campaign.

We we had a number of issues that went on, but we did get to orbit successful again on the very first flight at that launch pad and that configuration. And then the next thing that was happening is we had upgraded The Cape, because we had never launched the Falcon nine 1.0 was not able to launch with a fairing on it of any substance. We didn't even have a fairing. It was kind of it was a Dragon rocket. And so this was the first rocket that needed a fairing.

We needed a clean room, a whole different transporter erector, lots of upgraded systems. So the Cape had gone through a lot of, upgrades and changes. So I think it was September. It was in December we launched. And, plus, it was gonna be our first, geosynchronous launch.

And so, again, I I was there for all those first. And then, and and, again, we were successful in in reaching the correct orbit. And at that point, I met Elon the next morning after that launch, and he's like, Tim, you gotta go get healthy. You're no good to yourself or the team. I agreed.

He set me up with his personal physician, doctor Tommy Tomizawa, and he was up at Cedars Sinai. And, so we worked together for a couple weeks, figured some things out. And within a couple months, I was back on track. And Elon had said, whenever you're ready, just name your job, and we'll talk about it and come on back. So I did go back in April, well rested, healthy, clear mind, and I met with Gwen, who we all know Gwen is amazing.

She was actually my boss in those last years. So So we just started to talk about different things with some opportunities, with mission management, a few other things. But for me, once I went in the doors again, a lot of things crept right back into my head. And so I I thought, boy, it's not too much is gonna change if I come back. And I'd come from a dark place, didn't wanna go back, so I decided to leave that April.

Jeff: Alright.

Tim: And we I even continued to talk with Elon and Gwen about opportunities after that, but nothing developed, which was really great that they would think of me if a role came up or something like that. So

Jeff: I love the sense that they supported you. We don't often hear those excellent stories coming out of the leadership team there, even though we know that that's what happened, and that's what I take pains to tell people when they ask me about what it was like, is that the pressure was high, the demands were severe, but there was carrying underneath that.

Tim: Absolutely. Lots of it. Lots of it. I will say, though, I got home that night in April, sat down at dinner, told my kids, I'm leaving SpaceX. And my my two daughters started crying because they said, how how do we live without SpaceX?

They had only known SpaceX their whole life. They didn't know it was a life outside of SpaceX. I said, oh, girls, it'll be fine.

Jeff: And and was there life after SpaceX?

Tim: Yeah. I took a little bit more of a break. Wasn't sure what I was gonna do. I wasn't really the type that was likes to be a consultant and work, you know, for consulting hours for a lot of different projects. I tend to be one that likes to get involved with a project and and lead something in its singularity of it.

And so, once again, my phone rang, and it was Chris Thompson who who had called me way back in 2002 and said, hey. We're doing another fun project over here at Virgin Galactic. And, you know, it was a smaller project. It was it was more of a an engineering challenge than getting to Mars, but it did combine two things that I loved, which was aviation and rockets. And so we were able to transition the project, out of Virgin Galactic, created our own entity, Virgin Orbit.

We transitioned to a big, bigger rocket that we were gonna launch from a seven forty seven. So we got to go out and buy a seven forty seven, which was strangely named twenty years earlier as Cosmic Girl. So, again, I think this is a simulation when I see things like that.

Jeff: I didn't know the name I didn't know the name came before you guys bought it.

Tim: It was named when they made it and delivered it to, Virgin Atlantic.

Jeff: Wow.

Tim: And it was called Cosmic Girl. So seemed to be the right plane. And then we modified the the left wing where they can hang a fifth engine for fairing to hold a rocket. The rocket was basically a Falcon no. It was it was, yeah, basically a Falcon one size rocket, and we hung it from the wing.

It was LOX Kerosene. I left before its first launch. Our friend and colleague from SpaceX, Robin Ringuet, took over launch.

Jeff: Right.

Tim: So I was quietly on the side mentoring him in any way I could for their success and rooting for their success. And I don't think on the first launch, but the subsequent launches, there was several successes, which proved out the technology and everything. In the end, I would say that launching a liquid rocket off the wing of an airplane with I think there was six people on board maybe wasn't the right play. It has since ceased operations, so, that was that. And then, of course, as soon as my LinkedIn page would say, you know, I'm not working for Virgin Orbit, it started to blow up.

And so these two kids start had started a company in, relativity space, Tim Ellis and Jordan Noon. And so I met with Tim Ellis. And, again, I got intrigued by because it was something new that they were gonna three d print the primary structure of a rocket. I knew how difficult it was to build primary structures of a rocket. Chris Thompson certainly spearheaded a lot of that development from Falcon one into Falcon nine with friction stir welding, common domes, different things like that. I think the ingredients to build them now are pretty well defined. Like, at relativity, we we do quite a good job on that primary structure, but I wanted to see if three d printing could scale to do that. So we did print, the first stage and the second stage primary structure of of the, Terran 1, and it was amazing. at first, I never thought that would work, but it did. And they launched it.

The first stage was successful. The second stage had sat in storage for a year and something that, you know, shouldn't sit for a year that wasn't tested again failed. Yep. Classic example of that. But it did prove out the technology.

But in the end, three d printing to a large scale with their current Terran r rocket, it just doesn't scale. So they're back to classic tank fabrication. Most and I've my my level of activity at Relativity has gone up and down as needed. I was quite busy a year ago when the company was transitioning to a new owner, Eric Schmidt, who came in and and has been an amazing thing for them and then helping them get the leadership on track, getting their strategies in track. But now they're they're just they're they're running a great program right now over there.

Jeff: Yeah. I think I met with you guys once over there and been watching from afar. You always had what I considered to be the perfect role because they called you, like, senior technical fellow or something like that, and you could tackle the hard problems without necessarily having to be there every single day.

Tim: Yeah. You know me and others when you have to have a title. Tim Ellis said, Tim, you have to have a title. And I wasn't working a specific role like VP of launch or anything like that. And I said, well, we should be distinguished engineer, and we just chuckled and laughed and just got a big old belly laugh out of that.

So we just did it. I was distinguished engineer. It was, it was more of kind of a, you know, look in the mirror, laugh at yourself thing.

Jeff: Yeah. But you're for sure a distinguished engineer. I think you could accept that title, and you humbly probably won't, but it is reasonable that you would have that title.

Tim: Yeah. I think I got earned the distinguished with the beard turning white.

Jeff: Yeah. Exactly. And and what's happening now? What are you passionate about, you know, using your time on at the moment?

Tim: Yeah. I transitioned from California where I'd lived for thirty years to the Florida Keys where I was born and family lives. And so we've we've recentered our life and family around things that we can do here. It's fishing, flying, and friends, family and friends. But also, we've started the Buzza Foundation in 2022.

So we kind of operate, like we're navigating, like, our on our compass rose. North is needs, east is environment, south is stem, and west is wings and water. And so that's what

Jeff: I like it.

Tim: That's what my wife and I and my kids came up with, and then we try to find ways to work on that. Like, my wife, Joe, is active with an organization called Plant a Million Corals. It's a very local thing.

Jeff: Mhmm.

Tim: I fly Mercy flights and or support local students to get flight training. We support the Jose Wahebi Foundation, which is getting families coming through tragedies out on the water. We do care for all. Like, there's a lot of people that fall through the cracks here in The Keys that fall out of traditional hospice for various reasons, and they're almost out on the street. So people can talk about how do people end up homeless.

We we see them fall out. They're very, very close, so we go in and try to kinda pick up that last mile to to try to get them reconnected before they end up in a worse place. So, yeah, we we we try to work on those things. And, for us, it's, you know, it's more about, you know, grassroots stuff here in The Keys.

Jeff: Right. But there's some sense in which doing the things that are close to you geographically and close to you in terms of your emotional connection is the best place to start, you know, making the world a better place.

Tim: Yeah. I mean, some people try to stop and go, what what what is this big dream idea I wanna do with with charity or whatever else or not or or nonprofits? And, sometimes it's hard to start big. I think sometimes you're better off starting small and let your interests or success again, success in helping others lead you to where the next steps are.

Jeff: I think that I think that's true because sometimes the larger problems can be overwhelming also, and there are so many big problems. How do you even choose one?

Tim: Yeah.

Jeff: But if you can start locally, that helps you with the choice part. You're not, sitting there like a deer in the headlights.

Tim: Yeah. Exactly.

Jeff: I think a lot of the people that I've been communicating with who are former SpaceXers have this transition to make, where they're trying to figure out what they can do for the world. Some of them are still, like, in the meat of their technical careers and going to improve the world through that mechanism, and others are turning to other more philanthropic avenues. So it's interesting to hear from somebody who's like a respected party in this whole group and talk a little bit about your road into philanthropy. So I appreciate your mentioning that and bringing it up.

Tim: Of course.

Jeff: I mean, obviously, that answers the popcorn round question. Do you think we can make the world a better place?

Tim: Yeah. I have a little bit more on that. Of course, we can make the world a better place. I mean, gosh, if I woke up and answered no, I that wouldn't be too happy. But, yeah, like you said, well, lead by example.

Take care of yourself, family, and friends now that, you know, we have more time to do that. These are somewhat cliche. Listen more. Talk less. But, boy, that if people could just do that a little bit more, that would be quite helpful.

Like I mentioned, all the grassroots stuff here in the Keys, you know, I find that, like, what we said, like, we can figure out the ingredients of the local environment and local kids and aging people and work, opportunities for just something as small as the Florida Keys, like, I always say, like, every small community could achieve those things, then it's some would make the world a better place. So, like, some people wanna do it holistically, one big giant bite at a time, but I'm probably more the other way about starting you know, just learning how to do what you can in in your in your local community.

Jeff: I love that. And you have done it, and you you did it, like, what is it now, four or five years ago. So I really do respect that.

Tim: And it's growing at the pace that it should.

Jeff: Oh, that's good. I'm glad to hear that. So what was your biggest SpaceX takeaway?

Tim: It's the big stuff. Like, you know, I I'll say them, but there's more behind it. But, like, dream the impossible, reason from first principles, and execute at maximum speed with ownership. Like, those are the clear wins and takeaways from SpaceX.

Jeff: And if you come across people like I often do who somehow have got the bug and wanna get into this crazy world of you know, in some in many instances, they people wanna get into space. They love the look of it. What would you advise to somebody like that who approached you, a high school kid or an early college age kid?

Tim: It's kind of the micro dirty jobs, but it's build real skills. Like, don't just dream that you wanna get into it. You can go find ways to build real skills that will lead you into these these jobs. And, so whenever I work with kids in high school or college, it's it's trying to lead them to go figure out how to get these skills.

Jeff: I feel that that's the hardest thing, and I've been working with a lot of kids looking for internships to try to get that first leg up and to get that first set of skills, and that's been very difficult over the last few years.

Tim: I agree.

Jeff: Hey. I appreciate your talking to me, Tim. I appreciate your taking the time for it. I love seeing the the view outside your window, and, I hope I get down to the keys sometime to have a visit or you can drop in when you're in Denver. But thanks for the stories and for the reflections, and, let's not leave it too long before we get together face to face.

Tim: Of course. Two things for me. It's always great chatting with you. Secondly, thanks for putting the stories together. I I think it's the same as writing the books or other things. People know these things. It's good to share them. And then I think lastly, for this podcast, since you were such a significant player, somebody's gonna have to interview you and put it on your podcast, which sounds a little bit different, but you're a player that needs to tell a story too. So let me know when we can set that up.

Jeff: I would love for you to be the person that interviewed me. That makes sense.

Tim: I think your story is is a significant part of of all of this. So, yeah, sometime in the future when you think it fits in, let me know, and we'll we'll put that one together.

Jeff: Alright. LD, AVI, out.

Tim: Okay. Over and out.

Jeff: I hope that you'll agree that we all have something to learn from how Tim leads and lives. I also wanted to comment on the recurring story of the near destruction of the Falcon one flight four first stage. I think it keeps coming up in these interviews for a good reason. It was the day that SpaceX might easily have gone out of business. When you listen to the story told from different perspectives, keep that in mind. We were one snap decision from closing the curtain on SpaceX and everything it has become. This episode was produced with assistance from Devin Schwartz and you can find us at itsnotrocketscience.space