>>11343508Have you considered that I am that anon?
One of their targets was David Wrenn, a junior at San Diego State University. He had been doing phone interviews with SpinLaunch for weeks, and the circumstances weren’t ideal for an in-person interview. “I had been awake for like 36 hours at that point, so I was semi-insane when I met Jonathan,” Wrenn recalls. Still, the meeting went well. He took a leave of absence from college and flew out to San Francisco to join SpinLaunch, where he now works as a senior mechanical engineer.
Hampton says the early days of SpinLaunch reminded him a lot of life on an oil rig. Employees lived and worked at an old microprocessor plant SpinLaunch had taken over just down the road from the Googleplex. When Wrenn arrived, the living spaces were spare. “At that point the kitchen was like a microwave and a plastic table,” he says. “You had to have a lot of vision or nothing to lose, one or the other.” When they weren’t working, the SpinLaunch crew lifted weights together in a makeshift gym, watched movies in a “home theater,” or relaxed around a fire pit—the converted remnants of Yaney’s original tabletop centrifuge.
The team quickly ran into engineering challenges. The centrifuge they were building had to sit in a massive vacuum chamber to protect the system from air turbulence and stabilize it as it spun. When they approached contractors to build the chamber, they got one bid—with a price of $20 million.
So the SpinLaunch team decided to build it themselves. As an underwater welder, Hampton had become an expert at crafting airtight seals, which translated well to his new task. Yaney ordered a few vacuum pumps off of eBay and $500,000 worth of steel, and the team set out to build the sixth-largest vacuum chamber, by diameter, in the world. It took them eight months. “I think we all began to realize that there are so many things in science and engineering that have to be uncovered, simply because people don't try them,” Yaney says.
