Sanjeev Sharma and his team at Space X spent hours preparing for the launch that has taken the world by storm. They have spent hours in going through every little detail of the launch. But even today, weeks after a successful launch, he is still in a state of disbelief and wonders ‘did it really happen?’
What was your feeling when you saw that rocket booster come back?
When you work on a project and you know all the possibilities of outcomes and you play that in your mind. I think for the last two months, all of us have been constantly playing everything in our minds with paranoia. But once you see that happen in front of you, it is something else. I’ve been to the site several times, so I know the scale of things that we’re talking about. It’s not just a video for me. So once that happens in front of you and you’re watching, it almost sort of becomes an out-of-body experience. Yeah. I’m not even aware of myself. I’m just looking at that thing. And it’s just a brain trying to figure out what’s going on. What’s going to happen next? Is it good? Is it bad? That’s all that’s going on at that moment. Your whole being is just logged into that and watching it intently. So that was kind of like, it just consumes you completely. And then once that happens, it’s like for days it felt as if we were high. It’s impossible to even get to a normal soon. Yeah, the first thought is disbelief and thank God. That’s kind of the first thought. I’m still not on a nominal plane, even after so many days of this happening. I still have to pinch myself when I wake up and say, this already happened.
Engineering is all about, if it’s permitted by physics and you design it well, and you want to make it happen, you will make it happen. I always tell young engineers that the job of an engineer is not to throw spaghetti at a wall and see what works. A lot of people think that’s what we mean when we say it’s an iterative process. That’s not what it means. What it means is to look at all the factors, design everything, have an expectation of it working that’s far higher than just 50-50, and then leave it up to nature because you always learn something new when you’re doing something that revolutionary. But that’s where we are with a lot of these things. Success is not the default option. It’s one of the options. But you feel confident that there is a chance of success by the time you finish the process.
It is difficult for you at the very beginning, it feels impossible, and it feels like crazy to even try and do this. As you progress along and find paths ahead, by the end you get to a point, you get to a point where you feel that success is one of the major probabilities. Especially things like if you’re designing a bridge, you should know before the bridge gets inaugurated and open for public use that this bridge is going to be able to last for 20-25 years, take all of these service loads that it’s designed to. It should not be a guess. Engineering is not a guess; it’s designed by intention. When you’re pushing the boundaries, there’s always room for failure. You have to leave room for failure. But success is one of the major probabilities so you should try to get to that place before you finish your design.
These days, design is coming up in India in a big way. What do you think about that?
Yeah, I think design is where everything starts. It doesn’t stop there, but everything starts there. If you have a good design, whether it’s a product or it’s, you know, just a commercial everyday stuff or service or a phone app, you have UI, UX designers for phones, etc. So, there’s a lot of emphasis here in the US on design because everything starts from there. If I were to kind of step back and look at it, I think the over-emphasis on design in the US is almost a fault because right now you speak of, you know, that India is kind of waking up to design, whereas the US has over-emphasized design and under-emphasized manufacturing and operations.
Do you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing?
I think that’s a bad thing because what we’ve become is that we design chips, everything from chips to products, everyday products, maybe clothing and everything, we design that in the US and get it manufactured elsewhere. In China, in Vietnam or even India. But as an engineer, I see the value chain from design to delivery to the end customer as being one flow of value. And as a country, we cannot lose capabilities along the entire value chain. Because of globalization, I accept that it makes sense to best and most effectively use resources that exist anywhere in the world. But as a country, we cannot lose our strengths in any way through this value chain, whether it’s manufacturing, whether it’s operations, everywhere you see, everywhere you look at, you have tremendous room for innovation, for invention, for insight, for growth. Like I’m saying, I worked on, in the company Seagate, I worked on products that were, or equipment that was used for the manufacture of hard drives. And through our work, we could improve productivity by 40% and improve capability at the same time.
It’s like changing wheels on a moving car. So, I think innovation exists in every block of this value chain, but it starts with design. So, I wouldn’t downplay the role of design, because once you design something that’s ineffective, no matter how good of a delivery system you have, or how good of a manufacturing system you have, it will never withstand competition. So, design is very critical, but it’s not the only thing.
What is a typical day in your life?
I’m an early riser, so I normally get up at about 5.30 to 6. And usually catch up on the last day’s happenings. I have this habit of just following world events and what that means, pondering and following technology. So, I catch up on that kind of media feed. I’m very, I’d say, a voracious YouTube consumer. I find YouTube to be a very good tool to search and find things and kind of subscribe to channels, etc. I like that mode of content delivery. So, yeah, it used to be newspapers once, but now it’s YouTube. So that’s what my morning’s about and then I try to get to work. And usually, we have long working hours. What time do you get to work? At about 9, 9.30. It’s just very flexible in the US, especially after COVID.
We do have expectations or requirements of a time that you have to overlap with your team. And companies like SpaceX and now, I guess, almost all companies are back with a policy of being on-site in the presence of your team. I like that because I’ve always worked in hardware development. And it’s very different from software. In hardware development, if you’re not close to your colleagues who are also doing the same development project, and if you’re not close to the hardware, you lose a lot of insight. So, I like working in teams on-site in the office. So, I work from 9.30 to maybe 6.30 or 7.00. And then drive back.
How long does it take you to drive?
Well, LA is one of the worst areas for traffic congestion. Luckily, I take only about 35 minutes in the traffic. So, I live close by so that I have to commute less. When I was in the Bay Area, it used to take me one hour.
Concluded
This article by Shailaza Singh appeared in Rashtradoot Newspaper’s Arbit Section on November 7, 2024
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