Last weekend I traveled to Dallas TX to meet with a small company called Armadillo Aerospace. I have to say I was completely impressed and its times like these I love my job.
I got to met John Carmack in person. For those of you who do not know, he made his millions developing games like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, and selling the game engine to other great games like Half-Life and many others. The fact that he loves and develops video games that I grew up playing is one thing. Combine that with practicing Jujitsu and using his own money to build rockets on the side makes him one of the most influencing people of our day in my book. I did feel compelled to tell him my preference was RTS games but don’t count on him leaving the FPS genre.
I went down there to watch a test fire of their rocket and it is like nothing I have ever seen before. I got to watch this rocket, about the size of a car, launch from about 500 feet away. The noise it made was amazing and you could feel the vibration in your chest. None of the information I am giving is proprietary and it is all public information so I encourage you to visit the links above.
For a multi-millionaire, you could not tell it and I say that as a good thing. I have met a few millionaires from the oil industry and I can honestly say that all of them with the exception of one of my professors as an undergraduate was a jerk. John dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and grabbed a wrench and was turning screws with his employees. He had no arrogance what so ever and I found it very interesting that most of his employees were volunteers with day jobs. They worked in the day, played with rockets at night and on the weekends.
If I had a multimillionaire friend that wanted to make space travel available to everyone, I’d be there every night as well. If anyone can privatize the space industry, it will be this man. He now has a very powerful partner (NASA) that will help him take it to the next level and NASA will benefit from inexpensive testing. I cannot go into more details of the partnership but here are a few pictures:
The Logo
Me in the front, John is in the back scratching his head
One from the launch (only 3 attachments allowed per thread?):
So to answer the initial question in the thread, there is no way I would retire becoming a fat lazy slob paying to have my butt wiped for me (although my attitude of the bureaucratic system would change). I would continue to work my butt off on my hobbies but I have to say, I would be doing the same thing as John.
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