A couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk’s company Space X made headlines when it successfully launched its colossal Starship rocket and caught the returning 232-foot-tall booster using ‘chopsticks’, at the launch pad, a feat which has never been attempted in human history and brings Space X, a step closer to its goal of building a fully rapidly reusable rocket system for sending cargo and humans on interplanetary expeditions. Rashtradoot brings you an exclusive interview with one of the team’s key members who accomplished this feat- Sanjeev Sharma who is working as the principal engineer in Space X.
What would you do if you got 100 million dollars? Perhaps, you would buy a palace or take a grand trip around the world? Maybe you would just live life king-size for the rest of your days? But not Elon Musk. When he sold off his stake in PayPal, a payment platform, he founded Space X, a spaceflight services company in 2002. Later he also invested in Tesla, an electric vehicle manufacturing company, and acquired the social media platform Twitter and renamed it X. Today, Space X has become the world’s dominant space launch provider rivalling the Chinese space program launch Cadance. It helps NASA and United States Armed Forces in their Space Missions too. In fact, its Crew Dragon space craft will also be bringing back Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, the stranded astronauts in the International Space Station since NASA’s Starliner developed propulsion problems and was deemed too risky to be deployed for the return of the two astronauts. Two weeks ago, Space X’s Starship launched and caught back its colossal rocket’s booster using ‘chopsticks’ as its giant mechanical arms are affectionately called.
Since the launch of Starship, the internet has been obsessing about Sanjeev Sharma’s resume on LinkedIn. There have been articles about how he is one of the ‘key men’ in Elon Musk’s team and how he has been instrumental in the recent success of Starship. People have been commenting on how this man made his way from Indian Railways to become the principal engineer at Space X. We at Rashtradoot decided to call America and talk to the man instead of merely pondering over his resume. He was only too happy to oblige because in his words, this Leo ‘wanted to speak for himself rather than people interpret his resume’.
So, here is an exclusive interview with the man himself.
When did you decide that you wanted to be an engineer?
From very early on I knew that I wanted to be an engineer because my dad is also an engineer. He’s a technical engineer and worked for the government for years. I loved mechanical stuff like taking things apart and looking at how they work. I ended up at the University of Roorkee (now IIT, Roorkee). Back then, it was not an IIT. But actually, I wanted to enroll in the Indian Railway Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineers because I was more interested in the mechanical engineering aspects of large structures and the institute was famous for the hands-on training they provided. However, admission to UPSC through the central selection committee is so long that it takes about eight months after the higher secondary. So, since I didn’t want to wait in case I didn’t make it, I joined the University of Roorkee. Luckily the results came in after eight months and I got selected.
After completing my course, I became the assistant mechanical engineer in Dhanbad in Eastern Railway (as it was known at that time). Soon, I got promoted and became the divisional mechanical engineer. It was a very tough place to work in. It was all coal mines and the primary job was to check the freight in terms of railway wagons and trains and engines get combined into a train and make sure that we dispatch these trains over to northern railway or thermal power plants everywhere. The area was so out of place. There were hardly any facilities but I enjoyed my work there. That place shaped my work ethic.
I was surrounded by very hard-working people. But all said and done my motivation has always been about doing new things rather than working on the existing things or maintaining existing things or processes. So, I was there only for two and a half years and then in 1994, I was transferred to the newly established rail coach factory in Kapurthala. At that time, Punjab was coming out of terrorism and no one wanted to go there. But it was a very modern setup with a supercomputer, high-tech machines, and systems. So, I went there in 1994 and stayed till 2001. I started as a senior design engineer and was promoted to deputy chief engineer in mechanical design. We had to do everything from scratch including migration from manual and mechanical printing to computer-based systems which was first even for the private sector in India. At that time, we also got some grants from the UN and as a result, we got international experts to come to us and teach us how to design from scratch
Before that, I used to think that a lot of our engineering was essentially iterative and just tweaking what we had. But then when we worked with these international experts who taught us first principles and how to go about it I realized that I needed to learn more if I wanted to be better.
By that time, I had already been in the workforce for about eight to nine years. By the end of 2001, I had applied for further studies. I wanted to get a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and focus on areas where I think I lacked in terms of computer simulation analysis. Today, everything is available online, but back in the 2000s, you couldn’t learn anything by yourself since there was no internet. So, one had to go back to school.
But why did you choose an American School?
The reason was I wanted to learn at the best school possible. Also, I tried to apply to schools in Europe that were focused on railroad engineering or railway engineering, but the tuition cost was too prohibitive and they had no scholarships. So, the US was the one place where they did not have a strong railway focus, but they had a mechanical focus in related areas like automotive and aerospace. Schools in the US promised tuition waivers and scholarships for bright students, and that’s why I applied to the US. I got accepted into the University of Colorado at Boulder. I took the thesis option as a part of my master’s because that helped me to get a tuition waiver. So, I had to research hard disk drives. After some time, I got my research assistantship. I worked on the research and completed my project which the sponsors of the project liked. After completing my MS, I wanted to go back to India.
However, though I wanted to come back, I could not because of two reasons. One, I was always interested in product development research and design. Mechanical engineering is my first love. But my experience in the Indian Railways taught me that in India, the reason most people do engineering is not to get into the technical aspect of things but just to use it as a stepping stone to doing MBA in an IIM to become a well-rounded general administration sort of an officer. Had I gone back, I would have been responsible for human resources or procurement or something like that and would have lost this side of the work.
So, you wanted to remain on the technical side of things?
Yes. it excited me to be an engineer and bring new technology for the benefit of society at large. For example, my research and work on hard drives. I realized that if we produce hard drives that can store data cheaply, it’s easy to unlock several uses for digital data, which is precisely what happened. All the progress and information technology revolution would not have happened had the hard drives not updated their capability by 25 percent every six months for decades. Just imagine, the first 512 MB hard drive produced by IBM cost thousands of dollars and today you can get a hard drive of many terabytes for merely 20 dollars or something. So, it’s mind-boggling and all of this has been done by engineers like me and much better than me. This is how we see things improving in society. It’s the result of thousands and thousands of engineers, scientists, and technicians. It’s exciting for me to be a part of this revolution and that is what I have always wanted to do. And so that’s that was one part of the decision
The second reason was that the company (Seagate Technology) that sponsored the research into hard drives came back with a job offer in their R&D centre in Minneapolis. I worked there for about nine years First as an individual contributor and then I was promoted to a team lead. My job was to help in producing very complex electromechanical devices, which I had to take back to the company’s factory in Singapore. So, I was constantly shuttling between Minneapolis and Singapore. But after doing that for nine years, I saw a shift in the technology trends. During this time, I also did a master’s in management of technology from the University of Minnesota. So, I was doing my regular job during the week and on the weekend, I would drive up to Minneapolis downtown or the city campus and attend my classes.
Coming back to the point where you said that people study engineering in India not because they want to do engineering but because they want to do MBA and get more money. Could you talk about it?
Well, I have been out of India for a good two decades now. But when I was there, almost everyone who was doing engineering saw it as a stepping stone to becoming a manager. The best brains in IIT would either leave for the US or stay with India and do an IIM and become an MBA grad. This meant that all the physics, science and engineering that was learned in school was only supposed to be a stepping stone for a career in MBA finance, or private equity. In those days, those were the kind of hot careers to pursue and IIT in the resume was just needed to make it look good.
I, on the other hand, wanted to stay in engineering and not do an MBA. Also, in India, there were very few companies doing original research. Back then, most of our research in India in the engineering domain was reverse engineering. So, it was just about looking at technologies that have gone out of their patented life or technologies that are available and adapting them. It’s mostly innovation, not invention, a lot of which did not require higher-order skills. All it required was to be able to interpret and copy. With such a mindset, organizations and society would value a manager’s role more than an engineer’s role.
In the US, it’s always been different. Here, good engineers were far more valuable than good managers because companies like IBM and like Seagate had totally different promotion channels for good engineers and they would keep their best talent and reward them for any new inventions patents, etc.
There was far more recognition both within the organization and outside the organization for good engineers, whereas that was not the case with India I think that’s why all Indian engineers aspire to be something else but not do engineering.
To be continued..
This article by Shailaza Singh was published on November 5, 2024 in Rashradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section.
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