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?
Laura Crabtree - This Spacesuit's Supposed to Make You Look Cooler
Epsilon3 CEO Laura Crabtree shares insights from SpaceX mission operations and astronaut training, discussing hardware procedures and the future of operational efficiency in this interview.
1 Oct 2026TRANSCRIPT
Boris Lipchin - Only Your Worst Day Matters
Former SpaceX engineer Boris Lipchin shares his journey of cold-calling into flight software, learning from Elon Musk, and applying first-principles thinking to healthcare, revealing why only your worst day truly matters in this interview.
1 Sept 2026
Trip Harriss - It's Full of Wigs
An interview with SpaceX director of spaceport integration Trip Harriss about quitting trumpet for Star Trek, the internship SpaceX forgot to post, aiming a rocket at a military base, making Elon laugh, and wedding rings forged from a landed Falcon 9. Time is the most valuable resource — it is not renewable.
11 Aug 2026
Ted Cizma - I'm Just a Cook
An interview with SpaceX executive chef Ted Cizma about butcher shop beginnings, feeding 3,500 people in an Aspen parking lot, building a restaurant inside a rocket factory, breakfast burritos in mission control, and ending childhood hunger. Live right, set a good example, and hope they are paying attention.
28 Jul 2026
Chris Thompson - Employee Number Two
An interview with SpaceX employee number two Chris Thompson about garage rockets, an explosion in Garvey's backyard, beating Jeff Bezos in court, melting Elon's shoes in acetone, and Phantom's unfinished business. A theme of failing fast and leaving it at work throughout.
14 Jul 2026
Laura Rose Plaxico - Rockets or Cheese?
An interview with mechanical engineer Laura Rose Plaxico about SpaceX, exploding batteries, making cheese in The Philippines, a Keurig for frozen yogurt, robot cars, and putting your pride aside. A theme of humility and learning throughout.
1 Jul 2026
Tim Buzza - Leading by Example
Tim Buzza led test and launch operations at SpaceX for 14 years, standing up and operating test sites, launch sites, and assembly lines from California to Kwajalein. Every step of the way, Tim not only demanded technical excellence, but brought out the best in everyone who worked for and with him. In our discussion we cover Tim's journey to and through SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Rocket Lab, and finish up with some lessons on how to make the world better by acting locally.
16 Jun 2026
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
2 Jun 2026
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.
19 May 2026
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.
5 May 2026
Hans Koenigsmann - From Falcon 1 to the Kármán Line
Hans Koenigsmann: From Falcon 1 to the Kármán Line
Hans 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.
9 Jun 2024
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.
13 Mar 2024
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.
15 Nov 2023
Edwin Chiu - Expect Failure
Edwin Chiu - Expect Failure by Jeff Ward
15 Apr 2023
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.
21 Oct 2020
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.
5 Aug 2020
The Impossible Drive and Work Life Balance - Peter Dohm
An interview with entrepreneur Peter Dohm about his trajectory from college, to SpaceX and onward to Prime Lightworks and the LA Curling Center.
Inside a recent episode
Laura Crabtree - This Spacesuit's Supposed to Make You Look Cooler
Published 20 Oct 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] And our software helps with The latter half of that, I mean, we do help a lot with the inventory side of things, but that's not the first use case that we were built for. We were built for the process by which you test and operate the hardware. So a lot of times what we found is people were testing hardware and not recording what they were doing when testing, or they were running a process themselves that wasn't repeatable. And then the next shift would come on and they would try to repeat the process. So A lot of times when you're testing, you want to do the same test multiple times and see if you get the same result. […]
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