Rocket Man Chris Wilkins (Photo Credit: J. Levinson)

By Samantha Hammer

As his fellow first-years were spending their summers before SIPA finishing up stints in the Peace Corps, doing research on HIV/AIDS treatment in South Africa or crunching numbers for multinational accounting firms, MIA Christopher Wilkins was racing to finish designing the autopilot for a spacecraft that may someday take space tourists into orbit.

Wilkins, 28, was the responsible engineer on the design of the navigation guidance and control system for the Dragon I spacecraft, built by the maverick space transport company SpaceX, started by PayPal and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk in 2002.

Upon its first launch in December 2010, Dragon became the first privately-produced spacecraft to go into low Earth orbit and be successfully recovered. Wilkins, who was in the thick of his first semester of SIPA classes at the time, joined the crew in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for the historic launch.

“It was pretty awesome, pretty freaking good,” he says. “I think I was awake for 25 hours, up to [the launch. Afterward] I went to the bar and it was a disaster,” he laughs.

Although SIPA doesn’t seem like a natural next stop for Wilkins after his successful work on Dragon, he is a person who has no interest in continuing to do what he already knows.

He began interning at SpaceX as a guidance navigation control engineer right after earning his Master’s in mechanical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of New York

University in 2007. He loved the company’s flat structure and the innovation it produced.

“It was awesome,” Wilkins remembers, “because I was like 24, 25 and building rockets.”

Wilkins joined SpaceX full-time after his internship ended, and began his work on Dragon not long after that. Although his passion for working on spacecraft didn’t lessen, as Dragon’s navigation systems took shape, Wilkins started itching for a new challenge.

There was also the important issue of his girlfriend. She had not made the move from New York to Huntington Beach, Calif. (home of the SpaceX headquarters) with Wilkins when he took the SpaceX internship. Wilkins was eager to get back to New York so that they could be together, but there wasn’t much demand for rocket scientists in NYC.

This dilemma came along just as Wilkins picked up a sudden interest in world news.

About a year before coming to SIPA, he says, “I went on this international affairs kick… I watched GPS with Fareed Zakaria, and I was like, ‘Wow, what are they talking about?’ I didn’t get any of this stuff, but, [I thought], ‘That sounds pretty cool.’”

So he read a microeconomics textbook, watched a couple of hours of the news each week, applied to SIPA, and arrived at IAB with the class of 2012 in September.

Even though Wilkins admits that he doesn’t really know why he’s at SIPA, he’s not bothered by the curve ball he’s thrown himself. He does around 20 hours of contract work for SpaceX a week, he lives near SIPA with his girlfriend, and he gets to learn about what was happening down on Earth while he was helping SpaceX corner the market for commercial spaceflight. At second glance, it sounds like just the kind of brilliant plan a confident, intellectually curious rocket scientist would cook up.

Overall Wilkins is satisfied with the SIPA experience. He isn’t sure if it has given him reason to give up making rockets and move into the policy world, but it seems like a career outside of the space industry is unlikely. His passion for the industry is palpable and he doesn’t get nearly as excited about his classes at SIPA.

However, there are limited options in aerospace for a guy with a low tolerance for structure.

Wilkins’ bright blue eyes blaze in disgust at the idea of working for the defense industry, a common career destination for those with his background. “I got offered a job at [sic] the army to develop autonomous bullets, bullets that…like, go over a wall and find somebody and kill ‘em, and I was like, fuck, no. I don’t want to fucking make bullets. What am I, a murderer? No. I don’t like defense. I fucking hate defense.”

He relents for a second: “There is definitely a certain need for defense… and that’s fine if you’re one of those killer guys, but I’m not.”

Still, he has plenty of other ideas to pursue. “If I get some free time, I’ve got some good ideas on stuff to do for artificial intelligence, cool ideas on how to do stuff for energy,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong – renewable energy, I don’t touch that stuff. I don’t think it really matters.” He pauses, suddenly absorbed by the energy challenge. “God. Where’s fusion?”

This article first appeared in the March 30 issue of Communiqué.

Samantha Hammer is a first-year Master of International Affairs student.