It’s Not Rocket Science
Trip Harriss — It’s Full of Wigs
Highlights
Quitting trumpet (01:38)
Trip was raised by musicians to be a musician — a trumpet performance major, until his instructor stopped mid-lesson in his second year.
"He kinda stops and says, look, man. You have a lot of talent, but I can tell your heart is not in this. And you need to go figure out what it is you want to do… He was absolutely right. I enjoyed playing music. I did not enjoy the work and discipline that came with what was needed to make one a professional musician."
Scottie (02:42)
Home that Christmas, he watched the original Star Trek movies and found the exit.
"I saw Scottie, and I'm like, man, that would be fun to be an engineer on a spaceship. How cool is that? Right? And I went, that's it… So I called up the university and I said, hey. I'm gonna switch to engineering."
The accidental internship (07:52)
In 2008, SpaceX came back from Kwajalein after Falcon 1's second flight and realized nobody had hired summer interns. A Purdue connection passed along Trip's name, and Tim Buzza called.
"He says, hey, Trip. Nice to meet you. When can you be here? And I'm like, well, I'm in Indiana. So if I get in the car now, I can be there by, you know, Monday at this time. And he's like, great. You got the job."
Picking the landing site (16:32)
By 2014 Trip owned Falcon landing at the Cape — starting with the question of where. The answer became SLC-13, an abandoned pad idle since the seventies.
"Part of my job was to drive around and, like, figure, okay. Where are we gonna go do this? Right? Like, what a cool job… Let's go figure out — point to the spot on the ground where the first Falcon's gonna go land. Right? Like, who can say they did that?"
Aiming a rocket at the base (21:37)
Weeks before the first landing attempt, an Air Force analysis predicted widespread damage to critical Cape infrastructure — and there was no flight data to refute it. Trip's proposal:
"You guys have this number. We have this number. Nobody knows what is reality. And so let's compromise and say it's probably somewhere in the middle. Let's do one landing. Let's put out some microphones and get some data and then see what that tells us."
The landing was, in his words, a smashing success:
"The very first thing I did when I got on-site after the rocket landed, I went and I looked at that trailer and I took a photo. And I sent it back to the air force and said, look. No broken glass. You're okay."
Don't try to make him laugh (25:42)
Before a low-stakes meeting with Elon about a future launch control center, site director Ricky Lim gave Trip one instruction: don't try to make him laugh. Trip promptly told a Simpsons joke about Knoxville's Sunsphere being full of wigs.
"Ricky sees me going into this joke in real time, and he, like, reaches his arm across, like, don't do it. Don't do it. And, like, Elon full belly laughs because this is his type of weird humor… Ricky turned white. He thought it was over."
The rings (35:55)
After the first landing, SpaceX cut tubing from the recovered stage's engines and awarded pieces to the team. Trip's fiancée quietly asked his friend and teammate Sam Patel for his.
"I wanna surprise my future husband at our wedding — that we make our wedding rings out of the Inconel tubing from the engines from the first stage that landed for the very first landing. And Sam didn't bat an eye. He gave his award to my wife… So I carry Sam's gift everywhere I go."
The takeaway (42:20)
His biggest lesson from twenty years:
"Time is the most valuable commodity. Right? Every day counts… If you have a good sense of urgency, you are not missing opportunities to make progress. Right? I think that time is the most valuable resource. It's not renewable."
