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The Rocketeer: John Carmack

At id Software, programmer John Carmack made millions with games like Doom and Quake. As CEO of Armadillo Aerospace, his pursuit of the X Prize is no game. For Carmack, outer space and the riches found there are within his reach.
By Pablo Lastra |
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photography by Elizabeth Lavin
Carmack himself brings a hands-on approach to building the rocket that can be surprising to those who think computer programmers’ skills start and end with staring at monitors all day. Carmack’s preferred method of programming videogames is through isolation. His idea of a vacation is locking himself in a hotel room where he can’t be tracked down and punching out computer code for id’s next big thing. But at Armadillo, the computer engineer gets dirty, putting together rocket engine parts with his team. (Carmack’s latest birthday present from his wife, a gigantic mill the size of a truck trailer that can robotically sculpt a block of metal into any design, is a big help.)

“He’s ready to get out there and do the work, even sweeping the floor,” says Joseph LaGrave, Armadillo’s transportation and infrastructure man. LaGrave looks like a burly version of Robin Williams, and he has a background in construction, not aeronautic science. But his expertise can be useful when a vehicle with 12,000 pounds of thrust needs to be anchored to the ground to perform a test. “John has inspired me to be a part of something much bigger than myself, to be a pioneer. If we succeed, we will change the way people think about going into space.”

LaGrave isn’t the only one seemingly out of place working on a spaceship. Other Armadillo team members are drawn from disciplines far removed from rocket science. James Bauer teaches welding, and his task at Armadillo is to weld the rocket pieces perfectly, a laborious and difficult task, and one that must be done repeatedly when the rockets need to be rebuilt. “John expects us to crash the rockets,” he says. “It’s how we learn.”

Dallas has proven to be an appropriate classroom. “One of the great things about Texas,” Carmack says, “is we can get away with firing a rocket in the back of our shop in an industrial area without all the regulations we’d have to go through somewhere like in California.” That, and some extremely understanding neighbors. One Armadillo test rocket firing did catch the attention of local police, who, after receiving an enthusiastic tour of the shop, left the team to its devices without so much as a warning.

To be sure, members of the team have amateur experience in rockets, like Milburn. With Carmack at the helm, they all throw in ideas and see what works. “John has an overall vision,” says Bauer. “I hate flying and I would never get on the thing, but accomplishing this would be awesome. We would be kick-starting an entire industry.”

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photography by Elizabeth Lavin
“Rocket science is not as hard as people believe,” says Carmack, who speaks in a droning monotone that can wander into techno-science jargon without warning. “It’s been mythologized, when it’s really loud plumbing and moving fluids around. When an Armadillo vehicle goes into space and people see we use off-the-shelf parts, they will realize it’s not that different from something like building a racecar, which doesn’t have this mystique attached to it.”

Okay, so rocket science isn’t brain surgery, assuming you’re a computer programmer with a granite-solid math and physics background. If Carmack is right, small private companies like Armadillo can break the stranglehold NASA and its contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin have on aerospace technology. Space travel will be democratized. The question stands, though: Is there a big enough pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that can sustain private aerospace development? NASA, after all, has been criticized for squandering billions of taxpayer dollars to study things like the effect of zero-gravity on cake.

The answer may rest on the rise of two factors: lowering the cost of putting private payload, like satellites, into orbit, for which there is enormous demand, and, yes, space tourism.

In 1957, Russia put the Sputnik satellite into orbit, heralding the dawn of modern space exploration and the space race. Just four years later, John F. Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Apollo 11 fulfilled that goal just in the nick of time on July 21, 1969, with Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind.”

Human exploration of the moon ended in 1972 with Apollo 17, and since then space exploration has been less about pushing the boundaries and more about staying within them. But if the moon shot achieved anything—besides putting a man on the moon and giving us Tang and Velcro—it energized an entire generation to dream of space and its possibilities.

Anousheh Ansari is one such dreamer. An Iranian immigrant who made a fortune as the co-founder of Richardson-based Telecom Technologies in the ’90s, Ansari longed to be an astronaut. But she knew an Iranian-born woman had slim chances of participating in a NASA mission. Instead, she decided to join the X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit started by Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, a space enthusiast, whose board consists of similar space enthusiasts. The foundation’s mission is to promote scientific breakthroughs—one part of which is the private exploration of space—with significant cash awards as the carrot.

“We want to try to bring about some breakthroughs in the space flight arena,” Diamandis says. “Over the last 40 years, the cost of space travel has actually gone up and reliability has stayed the same. We wanted to create an incentive to bring commercial innovation about.”

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