Russell Newman

Don't tell anybody. But I got impatient. I enabled by "Rocket Science for Kids" book for distribution by Amazon 2 weeks early.

You can now get the Amazon's #1 new release for "Children's How Things Work" without waiting.

I'm not surprised I reached the #1 spot. There is a lot of AI-generated slop out there.

This book is a real and authentic way to teach your kids a complex subject like rocket science. No shortcuts were taken. I believe that this book will be the best book for kids on rocket science for the next decade or more!

Spark a lifelong passion for science in your toddler.

Today is the 12th anniversary of my first day at SpaceX! My choice to go to SpaceX as my first job out of college transformed the rest of my life!

I was captivated by Elon Musk's rhetoric of making the planet multi-planetary. I was just a college student who loved building robots and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I loved sci-fi, and helping create a mult-planetary society sounded super sweet!

Boy, was I in for a rude awakening! SpaceX was very challenging! I was given impossible deadlines and pushed to go faster than I ever thought possible!

I was required to innovate and solve problems at a blistering rate! The cadence and schedule pressure might not have been fun at the moment, but that stress caused me to grow as an engineer in ways that I don't think any other company could have replicated. I learned so much, so fast, from the senior engineers I worked with.

In hindsight, the problems and challenges I overcame at SpaceX were Type II fun. I'm very grateful for my three years in the crucible of early SpaceX!

The picture below is one of the earliest pictures I could find of me at SpaceX (December 2012). At the time, I was working on Cargo Dragon.

As an homage to my first "real-job" engineering project, I've added an easter egg to my upcoming book. There is a Cargo Dragon on page 66 of my children's picture book "Rocket Science for Kids" (rocketscienceforkids.com).

One of the perks of writing your own book is that you can add as many Easter Eggs as you like. The Cargo Dragon in the picture book is sitting on the "triangle" dragon Ground Support Equipment (GSE) cart I designed in 2014, which was compact, universal, and ambidextrous. It replaced the older "square" version you can see in my picture. I am very proud of that tool design!

It is crazy to think of how different my life would be if I hadn't started my career at SpaceX!

P.S. My children's picture book "Rocket Science for Kids" will be out soon; if you are interested in an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC), then shoot me a quick email ([email protected])

How does Starship survive the extreme forces of ascent? Very carefully :)

Typically, rockets are only designed to survive loads from 5-10 degrees of Angle of Attack (AoA). They also need to be pressure stabilized to prevent buckling. I wonder what SpaceX's max design AoA is?

Here is a preview of two pages from my upcoming children's picture book, Rocket Science for Kids. If you are a fan of SpaceX, then you will love this book. By my accounting, the book pages contain ~30% SpaceX references or SpaceX Easter eggs.

In this part of my book, I explain rocket tanks, loads, and pressure stabilization. The entire book teaches your kids (and you) the basics of rocket science at a true kindergarten level.

If you are:
🔴 Interested in learning about rocket science yourself
🔴 Have young kids that are interested in rocket science
🔴 Want to challenge yourself to learn things that you never thought you could learn (such as how helium pressure stabilized structures work)
🔴 Want want to challenge your kids to also learn hard concepts with the best book on rocket science

Then, follow me on LinkedIn and sign up for my pre-launch newsletter at rocketscienceforkids.com to learn when the book goes live on Amazon 🛒 and to receive more stories, pre-release pictures, and illustrations.

Looking forward to Starship Flight 5!