Ozan Varol - Think Like a Rocket Scientist

I N SEPTEMBER 1962 , President John F. Kennedy stood before a packed Rice University stadium and pledged to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before the decade was out. It was an incredibly ambitious promisethe original moonshot.

When Kennedy gave his speech, numerous technological requirements for a Moon landing hadnt even been developed. No American astronauts had worked outside a spacecraft.

Getting into orbit around the Moonnot to mention landing on itrequired mind-blowing precision. It was like throwing a dart at a peach twenty-eight feet away and scraping the fuzz without touching the body.

Yes, even the metals needed to build the rocket hadnt been invented.

We jumped into the cosmic void and hoped we would grow wings on the way up.

Miraculously, the wings sprouted. In 1969, less than seven years after Kennedys pledge, Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind. A child who was six years old when the Wright brothers took their first powered flightlasting all of twelve seconds and moving 120 feetwould have been seventy-two when flight became powerful enough to put a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth.

This giant leaptaken within a human lifespanis often hailed as the triumph of technology. But its not. Rather, its the great triumph of a certain thought process rocket scientists used to turn the impossible into the possible. Its the same thought process that has allowed these scientists to score dozens of interplanetary holes in one with supersonic spacecraft, sending them millions of miles through outer space and landing them on a precise spot. Its the same thought process that brings humanity closer and closer to colonizing other planets and becoming an interplanetary species. And its the same thought process that will make affordable commercial space tourism the new norm.

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. Theyre moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs. They know that the rules arent set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged.

Some of the insights Ill share in this book are common to all sciences. But the ideas assume a grander scale in rocket science given the stakes involved. With every launch, hundreds of millions of dollarsand for human spaceflight, numerous livesare at stake.

At its core, a rocket launch is the controlled explosion of a small nuclear bombcontrolled being the operative word. A rocket burns with unbelievable fury. One wrong step, one miscalculation, and you can expect the worst. There are a thousand things that can happen when you go to light a rocket engine, explains SpaceX propulsion chief Tom Mueller, and only one of them is good.

Everything we take for granted on Earth is turned on its head in space, literally and metaphorically. There are countless points of potential failure in sending delicate spacecraftmade up of millions of parts and hundreds of miles of wiringbarreling through the unforgiving environment of space. When something breaks, as it inevitably does, rocket scientists must isolate the signal from the noise and home in on the potential culprits, which may be in the thousands. Whats worse, these problems often occur when the spacecraft is beyond human reach. You cant just pop the hood and have a look inside.

In the modern era, rocket-science thinking is a necessity. The world is evolving at dizzying speed, and we must continuously evolve with it to keep pace. Although not everyone aspires to calculate burn-rate coefficients or orbital trajectories, we all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our daily lives. Those who can tackle these problemswithout clear guidelines and with the clock tickingenjoy an extraordinary advantage.

Despite its tremendous benefits, we often assume that thinking like a rocket scientist is beyond the ability of mere mortals without a special kind of genius (hence the common saying Its not rocket science). We identify with Elton Johns Rocket Man, who, despite being selected for a Mars mission, laments about all this science I dont understand.

This book wont teach you relativity or the intricate details of rocket propulsionin other words, the science behind rocket science. You wont find any graphs on these pages. No aptitude for crunching numbers is required. Lurking behind the elusive subject of rocket science are life-changing insights on creativity and critical thinking that anyone can acquire without a PhD in astrophysics. Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

You wont be a rocket scientist by the end of this book. But youll know how to think like one.