"But I was disappointed that it didn't turn out better. And I have, you know, a few theories on why it worked out that way.
You know, the point that I try to avoid, is a hubristic point, is that I wasn't as involved with Armadillo in recent years. I had smart guys there that I felt were competent and I respected their directions, but, me not being there left me in the position of not wanting to second-guess the boots on the ground.
When something would come up, and I'd be like... 'I kinda think you should be doing something the other way', but if I'm heads down on software, they're the ones there every day working on things. I didn't feel really justified... I never want to be that manager that's out of touch with what's going on in the engineering, that's just saying, 'Back in my days, we would have done it this way.'
So I let my hands off the wheel there, and we can't make an A/B comparison about how important that may or may not have been, but there were some of the things that I term 'Creeping Professionalism' that came into it, where... in the old days at Armadillo, we were all about, OK, here's an idea, run down to the shop, grab the saws and the welding gear, slap something on the mill and, you know, you've got something next week and it's fabulous, but, as we did more contracting work, and as people got full-time, we would have big engineering drawings, lovely stuff comes off the plotter with all the information about it, we have our revision controls and our document systems, and of course NASA loves seeing all this stuff, it gives everybody that's contracting a good set of warm fuzzies to get stuff you hold in your hands on the engineering documents, to know that we had a preliminary design review... all this makes people feel good when they're paying for engineering, but it definitely slowed us down.
Some of it may also have been the move to full-time employment, where, when we were all a volunteer team, when it was just me paying the bills, and everybody had a full-time job and we came here and we worked on rockets a couple days a week, everybody was really focused on getting the work done. If you know you're gonna be here for 5 hours, or here for 8 hours, there's just not a lot of time, you know, for goofing around.
Actually, we had a little bit of that when more people, we sort of hit a critical level, when we had a couple more volunteers, and I noticed productivity actually dropping, we pared out some of the volunteers, and productivity went back up. So there was certainly some of that effect.
When you get everybody and it's your job, you go in, and you know, you check your mail and browse the web a little bit in the morning rather than going first-thing down into the shop.
I had this thinking that, OK, people are working 20 hours a week part-time, and they've still got a full-time job, we should be able to get 3 times as much stuff done when everybody is full-time, but it didn't work out that way at all, where, when rocketry was people's full-time job, they got other hobbies, and they did other things with their 20 hours a week on it, and then your 40 hours full-time a week is very rarely 40 really good hours for most people when you wind up having all the little things you do at work that are not really work.
So, there's a number of things that may have contributed.
And we're still tantalizingly close.
One of the bad things, the things that we didn't do is we should have made series production, we should have made multiple vehicles at once. And we did this years ago with our modular vehicles, we made parts for 5 of them, and that served us so well. We got to crash every single one of them, but it wasn't that traumatic because we had more pieces there, and we just built another one. We desperately should have done that with these 2 rocket vehicles. That was our critical mistake in the last 2 years, because we should have been able to put more of these together.
'Creeping Performance' was another thing, where, we used to just make everything out of aluminum, it's not like the highest-tech material, but carbon fiber started creeping into our development systems here. We started heat-treating our own aluminum rather than just using thicker aluminum, and all these other things... this is chapter and verse from some of the errors that NASA has done over the years, and it's heart-breaking for me to see my own team following some of these problems."