It's Not Rocket Science – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Technical and general information from the podcast's RSS feed.

It's Not Rocket Science

Jeff Ward

Technology

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/182d. Total Eps: 13

A podcast exploring the life arcs of smart, creative, driven people who helped Elon Musk and SpaceX revolutionize the space industry. How did they get there? What was it like? What world are they creating now?

Read moreCollapse

Site

RSS

Apple

Data updated on 01/08/2026

Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

🇫🇷 France - Technology
19/07/2026
#76
🇫🇷 France - Technology
18/07/2026
#47

Spotify

No recent rankings available

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.

See all

No links shared by this podcast

RSS feed quality and score

Technical evaluation of the podcast's RSS feed quality and structure.

See all

RSS feed quality

To improve

Score global : 48%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

Year

Latest published episodes

Recent episodes with titles, durations, and descriptions.

See all

Chris Thompson - Employee Number Two

Episode 13

Tuesday, July 28, 2026 • Duration 40:40

An interview with SpaceX employee number two Chris Thompson about garage rockets, an explosion in Garvey's backyard, beating Jeff Bezos in court, melting Elon's shoes in acetone, and Phantom's unfinished business. Work hard, fail fast, but don't bring the stress home.

Read moreCollapse

Laura Rose Plaxico - Rockets or Cheese?

Episode 13

Tuesday, July 14, 2026 • Duration 30:16

An interview with mechanical engineer Laura Rose Plaxico about SpaceX, exploding batteries, making cheese in The Philippines, a Keurig for frozen yogurt, robot cars, and putting your pride aside. A theme of humility and learning throughout.

Read moreCollapse

Tim Buzza - Leading by Example

Episode 11

Wednesday, July 1, 2026 • Duration 44:07

Tim Buzza led test and launch operations at SpaceX for 14 years, standing up and operating test sites, launch sites, and assembly lines from California to Kwajalein. Every step of the way, Tim not only demanded technical excellence, but brought out the best in everyone who worked for and with him. In our discussion we cover Tim's journey to and through SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Rocket Lab, and finish up with some lessons on how to make the world better by acting locally.

Read moreCollapse

Tom Mueller - Employee Number One

Episode 10

Tuesday, June 16, 2026 • Duration 45:27

Tom Mueller became SpaceX employee number one through a quirk of paperwork, and went on to design every SpaceX rocket engine from Merlin to Raptor, all because a high school math teacher asked him if he'd rather design airplanes than maintain them. In this episode, Tom and I discuss the role of optimism in project scheduling, the birth and evolution of Starship, and how Tom founded Impulse Space to create in-orbit mobility for the space economy.

(00:00) - IPO Hot Take
(00:59) - Becoming Employee One
(03:42) - Betting on SpaceX when others failed
(06:06) - The math teacher who changed everything
(15:01) - Building Starship: simplification, methane & the last test flight
(19:47) - Quintessential Elon moment: schedules
(24:36) - Leaving SpaceX and starting Impulse Space
(27:31) - Dragon & flying humans
(29:37) - Building Impulse & the "true space age"
(35:05) - Outside the rocket: the raise, racing & the magic lesson
(40:34) - Making the world a better place: the space economy & philanthropy

Read moreCollapse

Bulent Altan - The Right Type of Challenging

Episode 9

Tuesday, June 2, 2026 • Duration 37:50

Bulent Altan started his career at SpaceX in 2004, fresh out of Bob Twiggs' CubeSat lab at Stanford, joining the small team working on Falcon 1. He stayed long enough to put his technical fingerprints on every major SpaceX development. Now he's the founding partner at Alpine Space Ventures, a venture capital fund making hands-on investments in European space startups. Even as a VC, he "gets to do engineering every day." Listen in as we discuss everything from surviving the hot seat on Elon's jet to advice for angel investors.

Read moreCollapse

Krishna Pribadi - From Merlin to VO2 Max

Episode 8

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 • Duration 32:20

Krishna Pribadi spent six years on the test stand at SpaceX in McGregor, Texas — Merlin 1D, the first OctaWeb, F9R Dev1, the first booster recovery, and finally Raptor. He left in 2019 and has since worked on cargo drones, traveled back to Indonesia to trace his family history, race-engineered in the Moto America Superbike paddock, and started a stealth-mode human-performance coaching practice called Tanaga Labs.

We talk about all of it.

Read moreCollapse

Hans Koenigsmann - From Falcon 1 to the Kármán Line

Episode 7

Tuesday, May 5, 2026 • Duration 42:24

Hans Koenigsmann: From Falcon 1 to the Kármán Line

Hans Koenigsmann was SpaceX employee #4 and the company's first VP of Avionics, Guidance, Navigation and Control, and later its chief engineer for launch and VP of Flight Reliability. He spent nineteen and a half years at SpaceX before retiring in 2021. In November, he flew to the Kármán line on Blue Origin's New Shepard alongside Michi Benthaus, the first paraplegic astronaut.

Jeff and Hans first crossed paths in the small-satellite world of the 1990s — Hans in Bremen, Jeff at Surrey — before reconnecting when Jeff joined SpaceX as Hans was handing off avionics to focus on systems.

In this conversation, Hans recounts the post-Falcon-1-Flight-3 meeting where Musk told a near-broke team they had six weeks to launch the fourth and final rocket. He explains why GNC at SpaceX owned its own hardware instead of writing specs and tossing them over the fence. He talks about pulling Gwen Shotwell into the company, scuba diving with Musk at Kwajalein, and the peer-review line that became his personal benchmark: resilient and unfazed by ambiguity or changes in strategic direction.

And he describes what it's like to trust someone else's rocket — and what the ride felt like. A glance into something that's way bigger than you thought.

Read moreCollapse

Paul Mahacek - Climate is Hot Right Now

Episode 6

Sunday, June 9, 2024 • Duration 29:13

Entrepreneur and former SpaceX enginer Paul Mahacek speaks about his engineering career and his latest project AtmoCooling, which seeks to re-green coastal deserts. Along the way, we stop in France, California, Antarctica, and Kwajalein Atoll.

Read moreCollapse

Joel Brinton - That West Wing Moment

Episode 5

Wednesday, March 13, 2024 • Duration 27:44

Former SpaceX engineer Joel Brinton discusses breaking into the space industry, hanging upside down under rocket engines, sending his DNA to space, having lunch with Elon Musk, the risks of space faring (including exploding rocket engines), ADD, imposture syndrome, and learning from AI. And that one West Wing moment.

Read moreCollapse

Edwin Chiu - Expect Failure

Episode 4

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 • Duration 25:37

Edwin Chiu - Expect Failure by Jeff Ward

It's Not Rocket Science – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

It's Not Rocket Science – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities