I’m going to make a couple of assumptions here, perhaps the most important being that I would have the educational requirements and certificates for a dream job. It seems many of these jobs are about to disappear, thanks to the coming rise of AI but that’s another blog.
I think at some time most of us have had a little fantasy about being a movie or rock star. In fact, I am a rock star… in my car. Alas, I’m a white boy and will even lose the beat knocking on a door. We’ll drop this one for obvious reasons.
After some thought, I think working for Stoke Space would be freakin’ amazing. Especially if you were part of the team doing the second stage. I know, SpaceX gobbles up all the attention but they are about to become the bad guys in the industry.
Elon is ending launches for outside companies. That includes NASA. No more Dragon Capsule, no Falcon Nine, no launching cool missions to Mars. Only things that make Elon money will be allowed. So Starlink and his data-centers in space will be the main things to ride Starship after the moon landings. NASA is trying to help Boeing with its Starliner Capsule so there will be access to the International Space Station.
The newer, small companies will not be ready in time to pick up the slack. There is a huge launch crunch in the near future. Among the small companies there’s one called Stoke Space. These guys are uber cool. If you’re a little older, you’ll remember the old Apple. Think Different. That’s Stoke.
Their upper stage doesn’t have what you and I would recognize as regular rocket engines. This damn thing doesn’t even have a heat shield. Screw thinking outside the box, these boys left the box at NASA for a cat. I’ll not torment you with some lame description of how this works. Here’s their website and you can search Stoke Space on YouTube for more.
So, Bezos and Musk are here to stuff the pockets of billionaires. In the end, they will harm the industry. Bezos has already set the moon landing back six months by court order. But there are other companies and several of them are really cool.
So yeah, working on the second stage of Stoke’s flying trash can would be a job you could tell the Grandkids about. When SpaceX went public, they ended what should have been a bright future. Tomorrow; little innovation, little new technology, but fat quarterly dividends for rich people. Which company would you rather work for?
What other job should I have considered?
I would play ice hockey (or simply hockey, as we call it), and be an NHL player.
Since early childhood, I remember epic battles between Canada and the USSR on ice, both at national and club level. These games were much more than just a sports event, it was an East-West clash as their political systems were reflected on ice in the hockey rinks. Which hockey school, Canadian or Soviet, will prevail? Which political system is better?
Thinking of playing hockey in Canada or the United States was not even a profession to me. It was a dream.
The earliest thing I remember was the Canada Cup 81 (yes, in 1981). The Soviet team was dominating World championships and Olympic tournaments. However, the Canadian and American teams that used to participate in these events were not NHL players because ‘professionals’ were banned from playing there. Why the Soviet team was considered an ‘amateur’ team, when the players have been spending most of the year at their hockey camps, constantly training, is still a mystery to me.
Anyway, any hockey fan back in the day knew that only Canada Cups (and other similar tournaments like the Challenge Cup) mattered. That was a true test of who plays hockey better, Soviets or Canadians.
Also, even in my early school years, I knew that the National Hockey League (NHL) was a higher quality compared to the Soviet League. In fact, we only had one club, CSKA, or simply Red Army, that was on the same level as any NHL franchise like Montreal Canadians, New York Islanders or Edmonton Oilers. The Soviet hockey team was basically CSKA plus some of the best players from other clubs.
…So back then I was dreaming to play in the NHL.
However, there were two grave obstacles. Up until 1989 no Soviet player was allowed to play there, simply because the Soviet Union had closed borders and didn’t let them join the world’s strongest hockey league, unlike Americans, Swedes or Finns (and some Czechs). Even the first ones who made it to the NHL, like Alexander Mogilny, a prominent young Soviet player, did it in an unofficial way, simply leaving the team while playing in Europe and then re-appearing in North America. Slava Fetisov, a Soviet superstar defender, was also having big problems to move from CSKA to the NHL, yet he did it.
The other reason was even more fundamental. I didn’t actually play hockey at some youth club or anywhere. I even didn’t skate well! We’ve been playing the game, like most of the Soviet kids, in our yards, surrounded by multi-storied concrete-made apartment buildings in the gloomy Moscow of the 1980s..
So, I never had a chance to be, first, a professional hockey player, and, second, an NHL player. Making it to the NHL is an almost impossible task even for Canadians and Americans because of the cutthroat competition from a young age.
Yet, I had that dream, being an NHL professional player, that was meant to never come true.
What other job should I have considered?
In the 1950s, it was commonplace for us kids to love railway trains. They were everywhere, and many of us fancied becoming train drivers.
In those days, of course, they were steam trains, with diesel locomotives only beginning to enter service in the UK towards the end of the decade.
But I was different. I didn’t need the glory of coming home from work with soot all over my face — indeed, all over everywhere. No, I wanted to be a signalman. Oh yes, the bloke whose job it was to ensure that trains safely got from A to B, operating the points to enable them to change tracks and controlling the signals to keep everything moving without disaster.
I always imagined myself with a cloth in one hand, polishing something important, while using all my manly attributes with the other to haul those great big levers backwards and forwards, setting the semaphore signals to the correct position.
It never happened. Instead, I became a professional musician and then a BBC broadcaster. Which, as alternative career choices go, wasn’t too shabby.
I was reminded of my childhood ambition this week while returning from a trip to Hamburg, where my brothers and I visited Miniatur Wunderland, the world’s largest model railway exhibition. It occupies two floors of an old warehouse and is, apparently, Germany’s most popular tourist attraction.
And it is absolutely spectacular. There are tiny cities, airports, mountains, roads, rivers, cars, boats and, of course, an extraordinary railway system. Thousands of little people go about their little lives, blissfully unaware that they are being watched by thousands of considerably larger people.
But what fascinated me most was the control centre — the nerve centre of the whole operation.
There wasn’t a mechanical lever in sight. Instead, there were several enormous television monitors, each showing a different part of the exhibition. And sitting there was a bloke doing the job I had always wanted to do.
His responsibility was to oversee thousands of trains travelling along 16,000 metres of track, deciding which route they should take, which of the 3,627 points needed to be switched, and generally keeping an eye out for anything going wrong.
I know, I know. It’s probably all automated these days. But that isn’t the point. I wanted to be the bloke who controlled the railway.
And now, here I was, standing in Hamburg, watching another bloke doing exactly what I had once dreamed of doing. Although, thinking about it, perhaps I was looking at it all wrong.
Maybe he was sitting there thinking: “God, I wish I’d been a musician or a broadcaster. ”And as I watched him calmly controlling his little railway empire, I felt something I hadn’t expected after all these years.
More than a pang of jealousy. A very small, but perfectly genuine, feeling of:
“That should have been me.”