Development, Design, and Test-Test-Test! (Memoir Intro - Part III of III)

Or how doing too much acid isn't always a good thing.

(This is Part III of III, and is continued from The History of New Space Methodology - Memoir Intro Part II)

With the future of the entire space industry in mind, I set out to develop and demonstrate the New Space mindset. Test fast, fail fast. Repeat.

Photo by Harrison Broadbent on Unsplash

In my freshman year of high school I did market analysis, performed trade studies on potential design modifications, setup my supply chain, and invested heavily into technologies that would accelerate the development process.

Most importantly, I put a lot of focus into breaking all emotional ties to the Old Space mindset. I surrounded myself with revolutionaries. People who, like me, understood that moving fast and taking risks was the only real way to progress. As a sophomore, the early discovery phase was complete and I was ready to move into a full-fledged test campaign.

In the interest of preserving precious schedule I quickly progressed from pot and beer to acid, ecstasy, cocaine, meth, ketamine, pills and vodka. Faster than anyone could say “Wait, WTH happened to Rose?’ I had gone all-in and I spent most of my time high on something-or-other.

I got an entirely new friend group and shushed my old friends when they tried to warn me that I was taking things too far. Some people just don’t understand progress.

My family didn’t like what I was doing so I did my best to eliminate them as a potential variable that might slow things down. I disappeared from home life for weeks at a time to stay with older boys, well, “men”, that I had met through my new friends.

I spent less and less time at school, and more and more time in situations that tended to create entirely new sets of problems that I had to stuff into that sack that I carried around with me.

By the end of sophomore year my test and development efforts proved to be so thorough that I was forwarded on to the psych ward for a week, where they decided the place that I really needed to be was in a drug rehabilitation program.

My teachers must have been impressed with my novel methodologies, so they delivered my schoolwork to the rehab facility. And, even more impressed with my academic efforts - they pushed me through to the next the school year because I passed one class, English, with a D grade which I interpreted as D-amnnnn-girl, you-da-bees-knees.

Despite the tremendous success thus far, in my junior year of high school I was irritated that things still didn’t seem to be progressing fast enough. I ramped it up.

My parents really didn’t understand the novel work I was doing (much like it took NASA awhile to embrace the benefits of the New Space mindset) and mid-year they cut all funding and kicked me out of the house.

I wasn’t one to give up easily so I took this as the opportunity I’d been waiting for to put 100% of my effort and focus into the development and test activities. After somehow ending up with my own personal vial of acid, I pushed the limits so far that I truly lost touch with reality.

As I depended on my boyfriend at the time to help me navigate life through the fog of a trip that just wouldn’t quit, I did wonder at times why everyone else didn’t notice what a badass dragon-alien I was.

But all good things come to an end and eventually the vial ran out. Oh, and my boyfriend moved to another state. Left to fend for myself, I tried my hand at dealing drugs but much like the time that I tried to re-sell luxury shoes online, I learned that as a start-up founder its best not to manage your own inventory if its a product that you’d actually rather keep than sell.

Summer rolled around and just about the time I realized I had never gone back to school and that my junior year had finished without me, I found out I was pregnant. I was 16.

I decided to keep the baby and so I traded in cocaine for cheese. Lots and lots of cheese, which by the way was funded by all of you, through the United States food stamp program. So, thank you for that.

And just like that, as my old best friend from middle school had pointed out, I had become a statistic.

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I understand that this has been a whirl of a fast accounting of the history and development of the New Space mindset, and that perhaps you aren’t sure if this is really how it all came to be.

You’d be right, because of course this isn’t the least bit how the New Space era came to be.

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But it is the beginnings of the story of how I came to study aerospace engineering and eventually work with astronauts during their final preparations before launch, lead overseas launches from an underground bunker with Russians looking over my shoulder, and be in my forties while having some of the cutest damn grand-babies in the universe.

The Grandbabies, 2024, photo by their mother

It is also the story of why Baby Reindeer hit hard and why if one more person says ‘Oh you don’t look old enough to have kids that age!’ that I might go on a rampage that makes headlines (ok stop worrying, that is a joke, mostly).

And it is also why I’m going to write this damn memoir even if it kills me. I hope you will come along for the ride.

~ Rose