John Carmack: Rocket Man

When I interviewed John Carmack at E3 2011, I was immediately impressed by the ease with which he spoke, rapidly but intelligently, about all manner of complex programming conundrums. Considering this was one of the brains behind id Software and its classic games like Doom, Quake and the forthcoming Rage (not to mention my personal fave, Commander Keen), this should come as no surprise.

I went in with a list of fifteen questions, but barely had the chance to ask five, though he managed to answer all of them over the course of a staggering 4,000+ words. The one I found most interesting was, unfortunately, one I had to cut. The one about the rockets.

Since 2000, Carmack’s rocketry hobby has taken the form of Armadillo Aerospace, a startup based in Mesquite, Texas, founded with the goal of building a manned suborbital spacecraft as well as one capable of actual orbital spaceflight. That’s some hobby:

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“Historically, over the past ten years, I’ve taken half of Tuesday and all of Saturday to be working on the rocket projects. It has grown – we have eight full-time employees in a big hangar and it has been a little bit sad for me to let it get beyond my direct control. It was always the most fun for a long time when I was the chief CNC milling guy, I was the guy who wrote the G-code and I would cut the injectors and all of that. Now, the full-time guys do that and a year has gone by without me writing code for the mill. “That saddens me, but I didn’t want to hold the project back to the limit of what I could contribute. It’s kind of funny how it worked out – after id Software got acquired by ZeniMax Media, people thought since I wasn’t the executive I’d have more time to pursue my own tasks, but it has worked out the opposite. I want to make sure that ZeniMax gets the value for their acquisition, that they don’t feel that they were sold a bill of goods or something. “But the team is going out this week [the first week of June] to White Sands Missile Range to fly one of the vehicles on the NASA contract. We legitimized the company when we started doing contract work for NASA. We were flying people with the Rocket Racing League for the better part of eight years and it was this quirky hobby of mine that I did outside of the game development, but we got to the point where we had an operating profit one year. The contract was a marginal thing, though, and in the last year, I said, ‘Stop chasing contracts! We need to fly these vehicles at altitude!’ “I’m so afraid of the trap that so many potentially innovative little companies get in, especially when you are in the government sphere of influence. It is bizarre. People come from the consumer side of things, where everything is all about satisfying the need and delivering value and cost effectiveness, but with the