Alper Özöner
University of Groningen
Groningen (53.2° N, 6.5° E)

featuring Adrian Galindo, Avionics Engineer, Blue Origin, Kent (47.3° N, 122.2° W)

Adrian Galindo is a really impressive engineer who grew up in Houston, Texas and later graduated from Rice University with a degree in electrical engineering. He currently works at Blue Origin, one of the few privately-owned space exploration companies in the world. He has many insights about what he does and why he does it; in a way, his career is an extension of his creativity.

My conversation with Adrian was my first time talking to someone who works in the field of space exploration, so I approached it as a very special experience to share my fascination with space with an actual professional in the field. When I asked him what his thoughts were on the spirit of space exploration, he quoted a co-worker: “We’ve got to be able to get off this rock and get onto another rock in the event that a large rock comes and hits this rock.”

Born in Houston, Texas, Adrian had a very clear idea about his passion very early in his childhood years. By the time he was in elementary school, he knew he wanted to pursue engineering; by middle school, he knew it had to be electrical engineering. The path leading to his current career was pretty straightforward. He was part of a gifted and talented program in his middle school, and there he found himself programming LEGO MINDSTORMS kits, a LEGO kit where kids can build their own robots out of LEGO parts and then program them. He started making robots he created “do all sorts of crazy things” and discovered his enthusiasm for building and programming. After that, he found himself building a telephone system with RadioShack electronic kits and realized “there’s no magic here. It all makes sense.”

Adrian has been working at Blue Origin as an avionics engineer for more than five years. Blue Origin is focused on developing the means to propel humanity to a multi-planetary species, which is more than the sole task of engineering rockets and operating them. One of the most interesting aspects of working at Blue Origin for Adrian is the “crazy passionate” people that inspire him. During his first employee meeting, he recalls the striking feeling of understanding how much more he had to learn after seeing that many of his co-workers had experience in the most prestigious organizations, such as NASA and Boeing, for many decades. For Adrian, Blue Origin is the place that he gets to be next to people who are very experienced, remarkably intelligent, and very good at what they do.

Adrian holds the view that experience is of utmost value in his field and a degree alone is not enough. When he interviews job applicants for Blue Origin, he looks for people who will be able to manage their work from the start. Since Adrian is a professional who has spent extensive time practicing and working on engineering projects, he is aware of the value of experience and the problem-solver mentality that comes with it, and he seeks this mentality when he interviews someone. For Adrian, experience can be obtained from any project as long as it requires students to organize themselves and solve the problem at hand. He sees two sides to it: the organizational side, where you need someone who is a self-starter to go organize themselves and get the stuff done, and then the practical side of engineering, where someone understands the nuances of electrical engineering that come from having practiced it.

Adrian is truly passionate about what he does and what it means for the future of humanity. Because it can take a long time to see the results of his work, he likens his anticipation about the projects he works on to throwing a ball to himself, hoping to catch it years later. When I asked about a memorable experience from his career, he was happy to recall a very inspirational moment after the first successful landing of the New Shepard rocket. This specific moment was actually featured in a YouTube video called “What 400 Very Happy Rocket Scientists Look Like” and if you look closely enough, you can see a very delighted Adrian among his cheering co-workers. Like Adrian’s metaphor of throwing a ball to oneself, this is the moment 400 rocket scientists caught the ball they threw to themselves years ago.

As a closing to our interview, I asked Adrian about his relationship with science fiction, and sure enough, he is a member of the generation of people who grew up being inspired by Star Trek and Star Wars. As a science fiction fan myself, I would love to finish with Adrian’s words about the place of science fiction: “I think…the role of science fiction is to start asking bigger questions and also to, perhaps, make things that you never thought possible, possible.”

Highlights from the interview

Was there a moment when you decided to be an electrical engineer?

When I was in middle school, we had this gifted and talented program where they would basically pull you out of class, and you’d go work on something, usually science related. The subject changed every semester. I had the luck of having a fantastic teacher for that, and her husband was an electrical engineer. We did a robotics program in that. Have you seen the Lego Mindstorms? I got hooked into that. I started building them, I started programming them, and I made them do all sorts of crazy things. It just took off from there. I started doing circuit design stuff, because I wanted to learn more about it. About why things weren’t working the way I wanted them to be working. I started designing my own circuits for it. It was just one of those things where I’d go learn some things, and it just went up a bunch of interesting avenues, and I was like, “Oh, this is it. I can’t get enough of this.” And so middle school, for me, was basically something, something, something, math, something, something, something, science, something, something, something, this program. It was mostly this program.

What led you to your current position at Blue Origin?

When I was at Rice, I was in the electrical engineering program. I’d done a couple of internships. I was getting to the point where I started looking for jobs, and I went to interview for Microsoft, National Instruments, all those other places. Another friend of mine at Rice was also an electrical engineer, and he happened to be an intern at Blue Origin. He had the same mentor that I did. It was one of those things where I said, “I guess I’ll go for Texas Instruments or something like that, you know.” And my mentor suggested, “What about Blue Origin?” I was like, how did I not think about this? It hadn’t really even occurred to me. I went and applied, and I came here to interview, and I absolutely loved it. It was an instant “This is a fantastic fit for me.” A long time ago I had known that I wanted to work in space. And at some point, NASA lost a lot of its funding, kind of stopped doing a lot of interesting things for a little bit. And so, then that idea went away for a little bit, but then it popped back up with this opportunity at Blue Origin, and I was like, oh, this is fantastic.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most in your position? How did your college years especially prepare you for it?

I like to think of the college education as giving you the fundamental basics. If you look at engineering versus a medical degree—in a medical degree, they try to front-load a lot of the learning that you have to do before you ever get to go practice medicine, which makes a ton of sense. Because nobody wants a doctor who has no idea what they’re doing and figuring it out while they’re at it, right? Whereas with engineering, they give you the basics, they give you the tools to understand the building blocks behind a lot of these things, and then they’re like, “Okay, go.”

So creating something out of what you learned is actually left to you.  So college education gives you the basics…

It gives you the basics, and it gives you tools for understanding, and mostly it gives you practice doing it. I interview a lot of new graduates, a lot of senior positions, and everything in between. And, honestly, just having an electrical engineering degree alone doesn’t really get you what you need in order to be prepared to work in the electrical engineering field for companies like Blue Origin, or for other companies. When I am looking for someone, I like to be able to have them come in, and I want to be able to throw them the keys. Here’s a problem, work on it for a little while. Ask me some good questions, don’t ask me stupid questions, ask me good questions when you think about them. But for the most part, go figure it out. And so a lot of that mentality and that ability to work through problems comes from having worked on projects before.

Experience.

Whether that’s student projects, you know—solar car, rocketry clubs, things like that, the kinds of things where you have to organize senior design projects and things like that. The kinds of things where you have to organize yourself and then go tackle a problem that basically just started at, hey, we’ve got this problem. And then it’s like, well, you’ve got to figure how to do it.

A lot of it really is the practical problems. There’s the organizational side of it, where you need someone who’s a self-starter to go organize themselves and get the stuff done, but there’s also the practical side of engineering, where you have your basics in electrical engineering that have been practically contextualized in a project already.

Creating your own lab and practice.

There was the design kitchen, which was a senior design workshop, at Rice. They basically made a job for me while I was there. I was spending a lot of time in it before I was in senior design. I was at that lab, just kind of poking around, messing with machines, doing things. And it became a really fun job because what I would do is I would basically go up to senior design teams and ask, “Hey, what kind of problems are you having? What are you looking to make?” And they’re like, “Well, we want to make this kind of thing.” And I’d say okay and go figure out a way to go do that. Take your abstract design and turn it into something you could actually make.

But was that workshop for projects that you were specifically given as assignments? Or people would just go there and be creative?

It was a little bit of people being creative, but it was also for people that had assignments. Those were usually senior design teams. So it was all sorts of experience levels, from really specific electrical engineers who were trying to solve a specific electrical problem all the way to bioengineers who had never built anything before and were like, “I want like a long hollow cylinder.” It’s like, you want a tube? Yes, we could make you a long hollow cylinder—or we could get a tube. It was a ton of fun to just be able start project after project, start from the very top and say, “I’m looking to do this kind of thing,” and break it down and figure out ways that we could make these kinds of things.

It sounds like a pretty nice environment to be able to learn in. When you compare yourself to some of the people that you interview, how would you say that you actually differentiated yourself? Was there any particular experience, maybe next to your college education, that helped you along the way?

It was a lot of things like this job that I was doing at Rice. There were a lot of personal projects that I had done beforehand. It was tearing apart a microcontroller and trying to program it to make my own driver for it. It’s the curiosity that gets you started in one of these things. And you get hooked and you keep diving all the way down. It’s those kinds of people that are usually well accepted at these kinds of engineering levels. Because that’s usually what you have to end up doing, and if you don’t have that sort of natural tendency to be curious about it and find out how it works—and not just the specifics of what you’re working on, but how the whole system fits together…I think that’s something that a lot of people lose sight of, especially in the early years of engineering. The fact that this thing that you’re designing fits into a larger system. That took me a little while to understand, even when I was starting at Blue. I had a lot of really great engineers here to show me how it’s supposed to be done.

What is a brief example of projects you work on? Your title says you’re an avionics engineer but what exactly does it entail?

When I first got to Blue Origin, my very first task was to go design, it was sort of a “let’s go figure out what we’re going to do with you, but in the meantime, go work on this.” So my very first task was to go work on the tunnel harnessing system—the tunnel networking system between the forward and the back of the vehicle that basically allows communications, cameras, et cetera, to talk between the two major electronic centers of the vehicle.

After that I spent the next large chunk of time, the next three years or so, designing the Hardware In the Loop (HIL). Which is basically, I like to call it, the vehicle without the aluminum. Everything in the vehicle except the aluminum.

Do you mean the loop like control mechanisms, and sensors, and the integration of all the sensor systems?

Exactly right. So, basically, we took the flight computers, and we fooled them into thinking that they were getting sensors. So each individual sensor was simulated in an electrically accurate way to make it (the flight computer) believe that it was getting sensor data. Then we took all of its outputs, and we simulated those outputs to see if they were correct, and we took that data and put it into a model of the real world, and then we closed the loop around the entire system—faster than the avionics could tell the difference. So, basically, we could fly a real mission. We could put it under weird stresses and be like, “Okay, if there’s too much wind in this direction today, how long does it take you to recover and pull the fin back in the other direction and re-orient the vehicle?” It was a really cool project to work on. Right after the tunnel harness system that I did, they said, “Okay, Adrian, we need a HIL.” I was like, “Cool. I can totally do a HIL. What’s a HIL?”

What’s a HIL?

It was basically a hundred percent blank slate. We want to go build a HIL, go architect it, design it, buy the parts, design the components, make sure it all fits together. I like to give the analogy—it’s one of those things where you sit down, and you make this giant interacting architecture between all of these components, and all of these PCBs that you’re designing. And you make all these interfaces and everything. You have all these schematic reviews and everything. And at some point, you are throwing a ball to yourself. You throw a football to yourself, and then you run, heads down, for like the next year and half, and then you get to the end zone to catch the ball, and you catch it.

Is that your favorite project that you worked on New Shepherd? 

So far. That’s what I’ve been working on for a good while now. I’ve had a lot of interaction with the escape system electronic motor control folks as well.

I believe there are many engineers from different fields working on this project. Would you be willing to describe the dynamics of the team that you work with, in terms of creating such a big project like New Shepherd?

Generally speaking, the way it works is, we have someone from systems, or from navigation, who will say, “I need to be able to sense the temperature at this spot in the vehicle,” within some absurd accuracy. They usually want like .01 percent or something and need to do it at a 1000 hertz. And I’m like, “Okay, that’s probably not going to happen. Let’s get more realistic expectations.”

A lot of it is people don’t necessarily know about how to measure electronics. The same way that I wouldn’t know anything about how to design a mechanical box or something. So it’s easy for me to make misunderstood requirements if I don’t understand the system fully, if I don’t understand that subsystem well. And a lot of times, it’s the trading back and forth of “Okay, well, I can’t hit that within reasonable time. I can’t be at .01 percent for you. But I can give you two percent. I can give you two percent today. So a lot of it is interacting with people who want data, or need data, or need to move something in order to control the vehicle, and taking those…I like to call “desirements” and turning them into requirements and a fully functioning vehicle. 

That’s a nice way to put it.

People will start off with, “I’d really like to be able to do this kind of thing,” and then it’s a matter of breaking that down, saying what can I get you today…what can I possibly upgrade us to eventually. The vast majority of engineering is not really the design side of things. The vast majority of engineering is understanding the problem, making sure you’ve agreed on how you are going to solve the problem with somebody else. Especially with engineering for space, the vast majority of time doesn’t go into designing things. It goes into understanding the reliability of that system.

What do you think makes Blue Origin stand out as a great place to work for you? Are there any pros or cons to it?

I remember when I first got here, Blue wasn’t hiring a lot of people at the time. The whole company was maybe three hundred people wide or so. It was quite small. But they had a lot of really talented people. They had to wait a couple months to get enough people together to actually have a new employee meeting. I remember sitting in that room with all the new people that had been hired in the past couple of months, and they would go around introducing themselves, and they’d be like, “Hi, I’m so and so. I’ve been working at NASA for thirty years…Hi, I’m so and so. I’ve been working at Boeing for the past twenty-five years.” And it was just person after person after person. You know, “I used to work on a submarine, used to work on a nuclear reactor, used to work on…” and then it’s like, “Hi, I’m Adrian. I have zero years of experience. I’m twenty-two years old.” And it was just one of those enlightening moments where it’s like—I have a lot to learn. And one of those things that Rice really taught me very well is that if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room. So one of the things that I do like very much about Blue is that I get to be next to people who have been doing this for so long, and people that are just remarkably intelligent, and very good at what they do, and very passionate about what they do. It’s a great learning—it’s a great place to learn and sort of absorb… just kind of bask and absorb some of the people. You know, one of my coworkers had been working at NASA for the longest time, worked on the Hubble Space Telescope avionics and things like that. It’s just like…you could just sit and listen to some of his stories, and it’s enlightening, it’s also like…this is NASA in the golden days. But there’s just a lot of nuggets of gold that are spread throughout there. It’s great.

Could you extrapolate more on that, on the environment that you mentioned? I want to better understand how not being the smartest man in the room helps you in different ways.

A lot of it is understanding what other people know that you don’t know. It’s like…in talking to this coworker who had been working at NASA for a long time, who is an electrical engineer, there’s a lot of stuff that you can’t do in space vehicles that you can get away with in consumer electronics, or server systems, or things like that. So you come up with an idea, and you run it past him, and he’s like, “Well, no. I probably wouldn’t do that because such and such will likely make the vehicle fall out of the sky…”

What’s the working culture at Blue Origin?

The culture in general is that you get a lot of people that are extremely passionate about space, which is really comforting to see, and you get a lot of people that love to see launches, a lot of people that love to see that—just love to see space progress in any way possible. Whenever anyone has a launch or an engine test, we’ll pull it up on a big screen and go watch it. Our own engine tests are, of course, mostly crowd-pleasers.

Jeff Bezos has pretty brave visions for the future of space exploration. I’m saying brave, but I really believe in those dreams. Do you have any thoughts about the future of space exploration yourself? Are you an optimist?

I think I’m very much an optimist when it comes to space exploration. I think it’s going to be a long, hard road to get there, but it’s one of those things where you have to go make the small steps now, because if you don’t make the small steps now, we’ll never get to the big steps later. And this is all playing our part in making that system possible.

The next thirty years or so, we’ll see some pretty interesting developments in space, especially with the rise of private companies such as Blue Origin or SpaceX or Rocket labs or other companies that are coming up and doing all this really fascinating work in space. I think we’ll see some pretty great developments. Like I said, space is a pretty tough environment. Waiting to destroy your vehicle or kill your people. There’s a lot of work going into making sure that our systems are a hundred percent verifiably safe for people to go ride on, and there’s just a lot of responsibility that comes with that when you’re designing a lot of those systems.

We are lucky to have a lot of private funding from Jeff, and there are customers that come along and say, “We could really use your engine. It’s the perfect thing for us.” Part of it is building the components that enable humanity to get to space, whether that’s through us or someone else.

What advice would you give to a student who is interested in your field? Electrical engineering or space exploration.

I think for a lot of these things, for things like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, these sorts of fields, a lot of it like I was saying earlier—it’s not rocket science. There’s not a lot of it that’s tremendously new or remarkable. It doesn’t require a new science to go understand how to do these things. It’s engineering. There’s a million choices that you have to make, and you have to balance them against what you need and what you want. So learning to do that, learning the basics of electrical engineering, and then going and doing projects and figuring out how to go do that process, and becoming practically efficient in your field is definitely the most useful thing that you can do as an engineering student. Practically become fluent in the field, so that when you do start, it’s easier and easier for someone to throw you the keys, and all the little problems that you have the first time that you try something are just like, “Yep, I know how to do that. Yep, I know how to do that. Okay, let’s go do this. Let’s go focus on the part of this that actually needs attention, which is the how are we going to do this, comma, in space.”

What has been the most memorable experience in your career?

The first time we landed a vehicle. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that day. The first time we landed a vehicle. It was an extremely inspirational moment, and I’ll definitely never forget that. There’s a video of it on YouTube. It’s called “What 400 Very Happy Rocket Scientists Look Like.” And it’s like, “Oh my god, it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing.” You can definitely see on people’s faces where it’s like I…I gave my life, sweat, and tears for this exact moment, and all of the past several years of very late nights to go see this thing work, and it’s doing what I wanted it to be doing.

Do you like science fiction or do you read it?

I love science fiction. I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars. I started to appreciate Star Trek more, if you have to push me for one. I think a lot of the role of sci fi is for us to be able to be able to imagine a future.

I think the one thing people miss about Star Trek sometimes is that it’s a future in which humanity has discovered basically infinite amounts of energy and everything suddenly becomes solvable. All these problems that we had previously, the life of need goes away. You no longer are in need of anything. I think it’s this beautiful image of where humanity could be if we could get the resources that we want, or get to the places where we want to be. And it suddenly becomes a question of okay, now that you no longer need anything, what do you want to be doing? Do you want to be creating new technologies? Do you want to be exploring space? Do you want to be questioning, you know, what your role in all of this is? It opens up so many questions. I think that’s the role of science fiction is to start asking bigger questions and also to perhaps make things that you never thought possible, possible.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.