Deja Vu All Over Again

This week has been filled with news of a Chinese balloon flying at 60,000 feet over the United States and it has begun to cause a mild form of mass hysteria in the public. You can read more about it here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11712125/Explosion-sky-Billings-Montana-Chinese-balloon-spotted-U-S-airspace.html This takes me back to a time in the 1990’s when I was involved in ballooning at the French Space Agency. We were developing balloons for Mars and the analog altitude to fly them on Earth was 120,000 feet. However, as you soon find out, mixing helium and plastic bags is anything but simple.

The latest Chinese balloon incident is unnerving the US public and the federal government as it is flying near operational altitudes of jetliners over the US. It’s down to 60,000 feet altitude and seems to be anything but a rogue balloon if it’s been at this altitude from the beginning. As I found out working with Worldview Enterprises, you can use steering winds at these altitudes to make the balloon go mostly here you want it to go. This takes active control and is not the behavior of the so called rogue balloon. Other reports mention that the balloon started at 120,000 feet and there is little opportunity to steer the ballon at this altitude. This, if true, would imply that the balloon is indeed a rogue device without active steering and now simply following the jet stream at lower altitude.

What is ironic is that these devices are very difficult to take down with conventional weapons. I had this experience during my experiences in France where we had a few rogue balloons. I talk about this in my upcoming book Breaking All The Rules:

“The summer of 1990 was to be a busy one. We had numerous balloon flight tests planned to validate the basic super pressure balloon, a free flight in the desert to test the SNAKE and balloon system in ground-contacting mode, and a trip to Russia planned to evaluate a SNAKE radar test site in Latvia. As is the tradition in France, nearly the entire country takes the whole month of August off. I found this idea of taking a month off of work to be both very foreign and appealing at the same time. My time frames would not allow it but I still needed to work around everyone else’s schedules. We had planned a desert test in September in the Mojave Desert so I planned to spend my time back in the U.S. after the test catching up with family. Still, we had a lot of preparation for the tests and I had the entire country of France to myself during the month of August and remained at work.

Our first balloon flight tests took place out of a spot called Gap high in the French Alps near the Italian border. This small town permitted us to fly the balloon at 120,000 feet in the atmosphere where the conditions resemble the Mars atmosphere and cut the balloon down west of the site near our other test area at Aire Sur L’Adour in western France. We brought a number of balloon test vehicles along with gondolas that would transmit position and critical balloon performance data back to us. They also accepted commands to deflate the balloon and cause the gondola payload to parachute down to the ground. It was customary to place identifying plaques on the payloads in the rare case that we lost the payloads and in the hope that this would encourage anyone who found it to contact us. In our rush to leave the facilities in Toulouse and make it to Gap, we forgot to mount the identification plaques. As it turns out, I was the only one who brought business cards with me to the test so we decided to put my business cards on the outside of the payloads.

Our first balloon, constituting some 5000 cubic meters and filled with helium, lifted off from Gap early in the morning in July. The ascent was normal and everything appeared to be performing nominally. During this particular time of the year, known as the stratospheric turnaround, the balloons would drift overhead for a period of time and then head slowly west due to the easterly zonal winds at 120,000 feet. This went as planned on the first flight but when we went to cut the balloon down, we lost communication with the gondola. This would normally be a good reason for panic but in this case, the balloon was heading for the open Atlantic and would be expected to be well above any airline traffic. In any case, we could not track it so all we could do was to report this as a rogue balloon to French air traffic controllers. As I was to find out later in my career, the business of a ‘rogue balloon’ was a very big deal to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and would revoke your license to fly balloons. In France, the attitude was much more casual and without any noticeable consequences.

Our next balloon flight used a backup of the same equipment and was launched a few days later from Gap. This one performed as expected and remained very close to our target drop location. Unlike the last balloon, when we commanded the gondola to terminate flight, it separated from the balloon and headed down towards the recovery point. The balloon, however, did not self-destruct in the way it was designed and managed to stay aloft. The balloon had a hot wire in the bottom of the balloon fabric that melted the thin Mylar and the deployment of the gondola would tip the balloon upside-down encouraging the helium to empty from the balloon. This did not work as planned. We monitored it for a few hours as it dropped down to about 60,000 feet and wandered north as it encountered the lower atmosphere circulation. Again, we notified the French aviation authorities and again nobody seemed overly excited about this latest failure.

The next day, I took the opportunity to head back to CNES with a colleague who was needing to go back early and go back to work. I was pretty much alone in the project office when the phone rang and our secretary answered the phone. It was from a Colonel in the French Air Force looking to talk to someone about the rogue balloon we had just launched. Apparently, it was menacing the Paris air space floating along at 40,000-50,000 feet. It was still too high to interfere with much air traffic but the angst among aviation officials was high enough that they notified the French Air Force (otherwise known as L’armee de L’air). Annie, our secretary, convinced me to talk to the Colonel and I brought my best French. By this time, my French skills were beginning to be passable but most of what I had learned was from hanging around in the CNES machine shop and talking with the machinists. To say that the majority of my French vocabulary was not meant for polite society would be an understatement. As I spoke on the phone, the limits of my French became immediately apparent and we switched to English. I was surprised to find out that this gentleman wanted advice on how to shoot down the balloon with military aircraft. He informed me that they had sent Mirage fighters to do a fast pass of the balloon on a vertical trajectory and it looked mostly intact. He asked me about using large-caliber bullets and air-to-air missiles to cause the balloon to burst. After a 30-minute-long surreal discussion about shooting down our balloon over one of the most beautiful cities in the world, we parted company. I never found out if they tried to shoot the balloon or just let it drift away.

Our second balloon came back to revisit me later in August. I was again working alone in the office during the month when everyone else would be on vacation. I enjoyed the solitude and the ability to get a lot done without interruptions. A lot of preparations were going on in the U.S. for our balloon tests in the desert later in September and this also gave me more flexible hours to work with my colleagues there in the U.S. eight hours behind us. I was beginning to get used to the rhythm of working quietly at CNES during the day and spending the evenings on the phone at home discussing progress with my U.S. colleagues. When the phone rang in my office late in the afternoon that day, I assumed that it was one of my colleagues from USU working on the SNAKE prototype that we would be testing in a few weeks. When I picked up the phone, the voice was definitely American but this was a Sheriff from Cook County Illinois near Chicago. He was looking to speak with me and explained that he had come across a rather mysterious object that had my business card on it and was trying to figure out how to return it to its rightful owner. As the Sheriff described it, he was called to investigate a large clear plastic bag draped over utility lines on a county road. Once they successfully removed it from the lines, they found the gondola still attached to the balloon along with my business card. I was somewhat horrified but simultaneously amused that the balloon had made it this far yet was found. This was clearly our rogue balloon that disappeared from GAP. The Sheriff mentioned that since this was a French government device, he would box it up and hand it off to the French consulate in Chicago. Some months later we would receive this box along with some stern words and warnings from the embassy officials about not repeating this.”

A Journey Down Memory Lane

There comes a time in life where we all have to clean out those closets, storage lockers and corners of the garage. If you are like most people, one of the main components among the stored items is boxes of old files. Several recent life events, most prominently my step father passing and the experience of cleaning out his house, have prompted me to begin cleaning up all this old stuff I have laying around. I simply don’t want to leave this as a burden to my family and others after I am gone. Not that I am planning on departing this Earth anytime soon, but rather I am simply reflecting on the burden that it leaves behind.

As I surveyed my possessions, even the ones hidden in storage units, they fell into three main categories: auto parts and car projects that I may or may not ever get to, family heirlooms and furniture that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of and boxes and boxes of books and files.

The car parts were easy to deal with. It was time to either get to finishing the projects or get rid of the parts and the car. This led to a wholesale flushing of my warehouse where all this ‘treasure’ has been contained. I sold a few parts and projects off but more importantly, I decided to send some long unfinished projects out to be finished by others with more time and talent than I have. The broken Maserati that has been sitting for 18 months waiting for me to fix it goes to Ferrari of Scottsdale for repair. The Lamborghini 400GT restoration project goes to Bobileff Motors in San Diego for an extensive restoration. I am reserving the race car projects to finish myself as I truly enjoy building these cars and stand a chance of finishing them in the next few years. All spare parts that I ‘might use’ in the future got sold or tossed. “He was a Hoarder’ will NOT be written as my epitaph !!!

The Lamborghini 400GT in parts. I have spent the last 10 years collecting the parts to reassemble this very rare and valuable car. Time to turn it over to pros to get it done !

Family furniture and heirlooms were a harder decision. How do you treat the cedar chest that your grandmother brought across the plains on a horse drawn wagon ? Its irreplaceable and valuable only to those who cherish the memories. Well, you find a place in your home to put such sentimental artifacts. Same with your grandmother’s rocking chair that you remember from your childhood. You sat on your grandmother’s lap while she rocked you to sleep in this chair. Definitely a keeper. Furniture from the first marriage ? Toss it in the dumpster. I have learned to love Goodwill and their willingness to re-home my old furniture. Thanks to Goodwill, I have avoided much angst in tossing otherwise good furniture and household goods.

Then there are the boxes. Boxes of books. Boxes of kids’ projects from school. Boxes of tax records. Boxes of contracts and files from old businesses. Each box requires a careful look as to not throw away something valuable. The problem is that these valuable items are but a needle swimming in a sea of papers.

The books were easy. Unless they were a particularly valuable or meaningful book to me, they go to Goodwill for intellectual recycling. Books have fallen out of fashion, but I am still of the era where I cherish my books.

The boxes of files are another matter. The temptation is to toss them all out in the dumpster and count yourself free of the burden. After all, how valuable can 20 year old tax records be ? Then the sharp eye catches a rare and interesting file.

One of the boxes I opened contained an old orange manilla folder labeled ‘SpaceX’. I already had what I thought was a complete set of records from my days at SpaceX in my file cabinet. I was surprised at what I found in this heretofore unknown folder. I apparently had early hiring papers and shareholder agreements and this file folder had all of these missing documents. Normally, this would not be such a grand discovery but in this case, I am beginning to see SpaceX and Elon Musk as truly historic to the history of space exploration and this otherwise insignificant set of records as important.

It’s worth keeping all of the papers that document my early involvement at SpaceX. This is especially true today as there is a small group of internet trolls gradually trying to rewrite history. First they tried to modify my Wikipedia page to erase my involvement with SpaceX. Fueling this effort was an interview Elon gave to Eric Berger for his new book where Elon claimed that I “never worked for SpaceX”. Elon’s lawyers have also written me letters to this effect. I shared many of my employment and shareholder documents with Elon’s attorneys in the past and they somehow ceased writing me. I tried to share these same documents with Eric but he chose instead to believe Elon’s missives rather than write the truth. Now the trolls are defacing my Wikipedia page to say that while I never worked for SpaceX, I was somehow ‘dismissed’ by the company. A logical disconnect.

In addition to the controversy over whether I actually worked for SpaceX or not, there has also been a lot of controversy caused by some calling me a ‘co-founder’ of SpaceX. I am very careful to not use that term but many writers and reporters can’t resist the urge of the headline beginning with “SpaceX Co-Founder ….”. Instead, I have opted to refer to myself as ‘SpaceX Founding Member’. What can a person do ? That’s where the official records come in.

So this sets both my memory and official record straight. I was hired as a “Founding Member” of the company in the role of VP Business Development. This should provide solace for those worried about such things. As for me, I am just happy to have found these precious pieces of history rather than having tossed them in the dumpster !



Two Hours Until Dawn

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My love for road racing is one of the forces in my life that continues to propel me forward. It challenges me to further develop my best capabilities. It drives me to improve my outcomes. The passion of competing against others in a contest of speed, talent and judgment is much like being an entrepreneur and the lessons drawn from it apply directly to my experiences as an entreprenuer. 

I have competed in a number of 24 hour races. Compared to shorter 30 minute sprint races and eight hour endurance events, the 24 hour race is in a class of its own. It's a contest of preparation, machinery, team experience, skill, personal ability, team preparedness, team work and personal attitude. In this way, racing closely resembles startups and entrepreneurship in general. 

In a long 24 hour endurance event, we begin the race with a finite resource (a car that must last the duration), a finite supply of tires, a limited set of spare parts, and limited team energy.  Often we enter these events on a tight financial budget so we have to watch both our technical and financial resource expenditure.  This starts to sound a lot more like a startup with every phase.

The most valuable lesson I have learned from endurance racing is to never, ever give up. Simply put, the outcome is not determined until the race is over. The race usually starts off with the great fanfare, a military fly over, the national anthem, and all the pageantry of a major motorsports event.  Everything is perfect at this time. Like any fight or any war, everything changes once the race begins and contact is made with the competitors. Strategy must be fluid. The team must be able to adapt to changing circumstances and changing situations. Sometimes the beginning hours of the race go exceptionally well. Your car is out and your drivers are hitting their marks. The machine seems to be marching along perfectly and is running in top condition. After a few hours, human nature dictates that the team be lured into a false sense of security and eventually complacency.  An experienced team won't allow this to happen and stays attentive and alert. However, more often than not, the inexperienced team lives high on the initial euphoria until there is an incident or a significant problem develops. Sometimes a problem results from driver complacency. Sometimes it originates from a careless crew member during a pit stop like forgetting a vital operation. Sometimes it simply results from another driver with the same complacency or suffering a high ego to talent ratio.  In any case, this moment of complacency can really bite hard and in some cases ends the race. More often than not, it results in bringing the car off the track for repair. The team loses track position every second it is behind the wall. There is tremendous time pressure to get the car back on the track yet do it in such a way that the fix is solid.

During these times, it’s imperative that the team acts based on its training and good judgment. Often team members panic and react with more emotion than judgment resulting in unproductive brownian motion. Sometimes there are even more serious outcomes. It’s imperative that the team gather itself, find a calm state of mind, think through the problem, fix it and get back out on the track. It’s too easy to say ‘we’re finished let’s go home’. That's what losers do. It’s much harder to get back in the ring. Winners get back into the race knowing that while they have suffered a setback, anything is still possible. Experienced endurance racers know that the outcome of the race is completely indeterminate until the very last minutes of the race. Never ever give up. Keep pressing and keep moving.

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The hardest part of a twenty four hour race is the two hours just before dawn. By this time, the crew has grown weary, the crew chief has become grumpy and the drivers are tired and distracted. This is my favorite time to be in the car. My body rhythms naturally work well in the early mornings and I find this time to be one where I can make great gains. I am aware that most people see driving a race car at this time of night as somehow being the most insane thing they have ever done. Some begin to question the basic idea of ever putting a car into a 24 hour endurance contest and having consented to participation in the event. Tempers get short. Drivers get inattentive and the mood sours. 

I find the promise and the draw of the dawn to be intoxicating. Its easy to imagine that there is not much good that can come from careening around a track at 120 mph in the pitch black dark jousting with other competitors. I love it because the combination of dark and an early hour makes me see the world in a whole new light (no pun intended). I have to transform what I know about the track from the daylight into a new environment with less information in the dark. I have to simultaneously filter out potentially distracting features of other cars lights and the glare of the pit wall lighting. It's a mental intensity that one rarely gets to experience. It's one of the single most intense experiences of my life. 

I do get bored at times because the crew doesn’t talk much on the radio at this time of the night. Because of that, I have developed the habit to singing to myself to keep alert and to help my focus. A mental jukebox runs incessantly in my head and I sing out loud in the car. Sometimes its heavy metal. Sometimes its the Rolling Stones. Sometimes its John Denver. I have been known to torture my crew chief by singing whatever is going through my head over the radio at this ungodly hour. It has created some hilarious moments.

The best part of the two hours before dawn is the end of the stint which normally ends at dawn. Finishing this phase generates an enormous sense of renewal and optimism. To see the sun come up over the track from the driver's seat means that you as the driver and crew have defeated the night. The normalcy of the daytime has returned and the crew is energized by a combination of cat naps during the night and the sunlight hitting their eyes. The transformation is almost miraculous. 

I am always struck by the scenery on and next to the track as the dawn breaks.  A few laps in the light reveal twisted pieces of race cars off to the sides of the track, exhaust systems discarded in the night and the occasional hood or bumper off in the runoff areas. Its almost like the sun rising over a battle field. You can also see the battle scarred cars more clearly. Some are dented, some are missing parts and most are filthy with rubber marks, grime and oil. This patina almost seems like a beauty all of its own.

As I enter the pits for the driver change and refueling, I am proud of myself but relieved to be handing the reigns over to a new driver. After two hours behind the wheel, I am physically exhausted and parts if my body seem to have lost their connection with my nervous system. Getting out of the car is a major exertion. As the outgoing driver, you must help the incoming driver get strapped in and ready for the next stint. As I finish my duty, cross over the pit wall and take my helmet off, the energy of the night is still in my head. It's firing my neurons faster than anything else does in life. In fact it makes me feel so much more alive than I feel doing anything else in 'normal life'. All except being an entreprenuer. 

There is much that entrepreneurs can learn from endurance racing. The problem of resources, teams, schedules and problem solving all have major themes in common with running a startup. Most importantly is the requirement of a desire to win, determination to finish the race and the grit and determination to never ever give up. I have had times in various startups where it felt like two hours before dawn. Nothing seems to go right and everyone is down about the prospects of prevailing. There is a sea of risk that you are wading through and the only way through it is to get down and dirty with it and engage. Staying out of the fight is the only sure fire way to lose. I have drawn on the energy and experience from endurance racing to carry me through those moments as an entreprenuer.

If you are an entreprenuer, don’t ever ever ever give up. Your success depends on it. It may be nearly two hours until dawn.

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Five Things That I Learned From Racing

“To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live.”
Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain

Those that know me are aware that I have a deep and involving passion for racing cars. I especially love endurance racing where the races can last 24 hours or more and involve teams of drivers, crew and sponsors. Steve McQueen famously said that “Racing is life and the rest is just waiting”. For racers, racing embodies all that is real about life itself: truth, courage, faith, challenge, passion, winning, losing, heat, cold, discomfort, emotional highs and lows, elation and despair, and not knowing how the story will turn out. To the outsider, it may seem as if we racers spend our days making the money whose sole purpose is financing racing against others who are there for the same reasons. We are a small fraternity.  People who know what its like to careen across the track at 200 MPH while inches away from each other as if we were engaged in some sort of mechanical ballet are a rare breed of human. Looking on it from the outside, it must seem like a form of insanity. The truth is, however, that it really has deep meaning to those of us engaged in it and much of that applies to business and life.

I have been racing since the time that I turned 12 years old and had a go-cart that I could race against other go-carts. I graduated to drag racing in my teen years and by the time I was in my 30’s, I had begun road racing on amateur and professional levels. During these years, I have developed five major themes that apply to business and life. 

Preparation Is Fundamental

Victory goes to those who are prepared to win. Being prepared to win means much more than a simple attitude and saying to oneself "I am prepared to win". Rather, it involves hard work, thinking ahead, planning for contingencies, anticipating competition, and lots of practice. In business, I have often said that luck finds those who are prepared to receive it. Many of us know people that we would consider to be lucky in business or life. Perhaps there is a deeper reason why these people always seem to be lucky.  In fact, it is that they have prepared themselves for being lucky and are more readily able to see opportunity and take advantage of it. The best racers are the best prepared to take advantage of good luck and also the misfortunes of others.

Passion Is Key

When people ask me what I think the root of success is, I cite three things that must co-exist: Being good at something that you do, having a demand for what you are doing, and being passionate about what you are doing. Notice that money does not enter into this equation. Passion is the emotional and personal energy that you use to get through the hard times and drive your creativity and energy in the good times. If you are not absolutely passionate about what you are doing, the best that you can ever hope for is to be mediocre in doing it. All real racers are truly passionate about the sport. All successful people are truly passionate about what they are doing in life. All successful business people are passionate about their business and what it means.

Never Ever Give Up

If a racer pushes the car to its ultimate limit, they will inevitably find themselves spinning the car and driving off course having pushed beyond the boundaries of talent and machine. Sometimes the result is catastrophic but more often it’s just a minor spin. In either case, you have to dust yourself off and get back into the race. The best summary of this comes from the novel “The Art Of Racing In The Rain” by Gath Stein:

“A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is a winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. But he is still racing. He is still alive” 

It does no good to self recriminate in the middle of a race when you make a mistake.  You simply get back in the race and do not give up.  Those who give up, do not finish. The same is true of life and business. Its often easy to convince yourself that the race is over and that you can never win so ending the race and having a cold beer is the most attractive option. This is negative self-talk and is not what champions do. When faced with a setback in life, you must head right back into the problem, solve it, go around it or confront it. Never, ever give up.

Keep You Eyes On The End Game

Racers get distracted by the car in front of them and often drive slower, drive poorly or follow the other driver into a bad situation. The exact same thing is true in both life and business. In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle. In life and business, you must keep your eyes on your ultimate goals and do your best to avoid being dominated by the small challenge that sits in front of you. Don’t follow others into danger zones and go forward to create your own vision of success. Your life and business will go where your eyes go.

The True Champion Has No Ego 

Those who are truly great, rarely lead with a big ego. Racers love racing for its core existence in truth. There is little to dispute about the result of pitting people and machines against each other in a contest of skill, preparation and endurance. This is the truth that real racers crave.  Having an ego consumes extra energy, creates a distraction to yourself and leads you into false self-assessments. Garth Stein said it best in “The Art of Racing In The Rain”:

“To be a champion, you must have no ego at all. You must not exist as a separate entity. You must give yourself over to the race. You are nothing if not for your team, your car, your shoes, your tires. Do not mistake confidence and self-awareness for egotism.” 

We all owe much of our success to those around us and rarely is one person ever the entire story. Support crew, family, suppliers and sponsors are all part of the driver’s success. The racer is the one who brings it all together and creates the focus for that success. Ego destroys your humanity and your possibility of being the best.  Most importantly, it deprives you of your own truth and your own success.

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