Rocket Tyranny

I don’t know if you saw it, but there was a rocket launch this weekend. SpaceX launched their newest model of rocket called Starship. This rocket is a beast. It’s the largest rocket to ever fly. It’s bigger than the Saturn V which was used to send astronauts to the moon. Like most rockets, it is staged. It has an upper stage that will be used for people & cargo, and a lower stage that boosts all that stuff up through earth’s atmosphere.

The booster stage (as it’s called) is 22 stories tall and almost 30 feet wide. This rocket can reasonably be compared to a skyscraper. This was a test flight with 2 goals. The first, unbelievably ambitious goal was to execute a landing of the upper stage just above the ocean. It succeeded. The upper stage belly-flopped back into earth’s atmosphere, and at the last second it ignited it’s engines and turned itself upright just above the surface of the ocean. With the test complete, that stage let itself fall into the water. Launching and landing a rocket is SpaceX’s specialty, so this has become so commonplace that people hardly realize the level of achievement it is.

The real star of the show was the other goal. The booster stage–after successfully lifting the upper stage toward space–turned around and flew all the way back to the launch pad and hovered next to the launch tower. The tower then proceeded to take two large rails, called “chopsticks”, and catch the rocket out of mid-air. SpaceX just made a skyscraper hover next to a tower, and then that tower caught it in mid air. It’s absolutely insane.

What does this have to do with Addiction, Wilderness Therapy, and HSF? There are a lot of things I can talk about here: about perseverance (Musk almost went bankrupt trying to make SpaceX in the first place), being yourself (Musk is famously very quirky, but his creativity came up with this crazy idea), overcoming adversity (Musk has autism), focusing on the good in the world instead of the bad, and the value of community (a lot of people worked together to make this happen). But I’m going to go a different route today.

Rockets are complicated. There are tradeoffs at every part of the rocket. These tradeoffs can be correlated to the tradeoffs we make in life. In fact, rocket science is a great correlation for life’s challenges. We struggle for every step some days. Rockets do too. In fact, the term for how hard it is to add even one more pound of weight to a rocket payload is called “the tyranny of the rocket equation”. Tyranny is a good word for it. Life can hit us real hard. In my own life, I’ve been hit plenty hard in the last few years, and I’m sure you’ve had your challenges as well.

The whole point of there being an equation is that they’re planning ahead, and they’re accounting for the challenges. So often, we only prepare for life when it’s perfect. “I make $2k/month and so I can afford a $500 car payment”. What happens if you lose your job? “I can handle a roommate, we have a spare room”. We often forget how hard it is to share a fridge, thermostat, cabinet space, etc. Or how about this one: “I can handle just one drink.”

When I’m at my best, that credit card seems like I can outsmart it. I think “man, as long as I pay it off every month, these rewards are free money”. But when I’m at my worst, and life is hitting me the hardest. When I run out of fuel in my tank. That’s when those “borderline” and “risky” decisions are the most dangerous. I can prepare for that though. I don’t have to assume that I’ll always be at my best. I can acknowledge reality, the “tyranny”. I can say “I’m not getting a credit card” because I know that it will be a snake in my wallet waiting for when I’m weak to bite me. I can say “I’ll buy a beater car” knowing that there’s risk involved with a car payment. I can say “I won’t take that first drink” knowing that, even if it doesn’t hit me today, those habits put me in a bad place before.

I think that the most valuable thing we can learn from rocket scientists is that we can’t prepare for the best-case scenario and expect to win. Rockets have layers of redundancy systems in place, not to prevent failure, but to overcome it. We should have those too! They’re called support systems, and usually it’s a group of people we can rely on. Then we, too, can overcome it. I’m not being doom and gloom here, but we have to anticipate that it’s going to rain. We cannot assume that life will be all sunshine and rainbows. Our own addictions should’ve made it clear that it’s not.

Don’t let tyranny rule your life. Prepare for the challenges you’ll face, because you will face them. When the world knocks you down, you need to have the strength left over to get back up. So don’t drain yourself to empty. With nothing left in the tank, what happens if you’re hit with a surprise? We need to prepare for the challenges. And guess what? If you don’t face any challenges, then you have energy and resources left over to help others! We can go from addicts that need others to keep us going, to being able to lighten the burdens of others when they’re going through hard times. To go from being a burden to being a blessing, that’s what I want to do.