When hard work and determination meet a bit of luck, good things can happen.
On Feb. 6, 2018, the day of the Falcon Heavy test flight, SpaceX, an Elon Musk-owned company, launched a Tesla Roadster into space. That was also the day Simon Randy, who now studies mechanical engineering at Concordia University, knew he wanted to work in the space industry, especially at SpaceX.
Now, six years later, he is preparing to intern at SpaceX, on the Starship Components team. Randy will be helping to produce and review designs for new models of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful launch vehicle ever built.
Randy landed the SpaceX internship after finishing a different internship in Germany at Rocket Factory Augsburg. As he was returning to Canada, he unknowingly met the person who would eventually recruit him to SpaceX.
“What actually happened is that on my way home from Germany, I was wearing this [SpaceX] shirt, and I was stopped by a guy who was just there; he asked me if I worked for SpaceX, and I said no,” Randy recalled.
It turned out that the person who stopped him was a SpaceX employee and worked in the same field Randy specialized in.
Despite his American citizenship, which is required to work in the space industry in the United States, he still felt that living in Canada would be an additional challenge to getting the internship.
“We talked for 15 minutes, and by the end, we had added each other on LinkedIn. I told him I had tried to get hired, but it’s hard when you’re in a different country,” Randy said. “I felt like the recruiter would throw away my CV if they saw Canada because ‘Oh, well, you can’t be American in Canada’ … I emailed him a bunch over the summer. I finally got my interviews, and I got in.”
Although meeting the man who would eventually hire him at SpaceX was a coincidence, his journey from watching the Falcon Heavy mission to now was anything but.
“I’ve been super passionate about space ever since [2018]. That was in high school, and I said, ‘OK, well, how do I get there?’” he recalled. ”So I talked to people who work at SpaceX. They told me, ‘Oh, you need hands-on experience.’ So, everything I’ve done since then has been to maximize hands-on experience.”
This led Randy to the Mechanical Engineering Technology Program at Dawson College, a technical program where most courses are practice-based and where students learn a lot about the realities of working as an engineer in the field.
“Every Monday, we had an eight-hour course, essentially like a work shift in a machine shop,” he explained. “By the end of three years, you’re super well-versed in machining; I learned how to program robots, do CNC machining and welding, so it’s a really rich experience.”
While at Dawson, Randy knew he wanted to study engineering at Concordia, specifically to join Space Concordia’s student club. He is now its president, as well as the operations manager of its Rocketry Division. The division is currently working to build the first student-built rocket in the world to reach the Kármán line, or 100 km of altitude, which is generally considered to be the beginning of outer space.
The Rocketry Division is targeting to launch their 13-metre-long rocket next summer after having already reached multiple milestones, such as the completion of their launch tower and successful hot-fire tests.
