JOE PAPPALARDO: Confessions of a Private Space Rocket Engineer. “It’s a hell of a time to be working as a young space engineer in the United States. Back in the day—and by that we mean less than 10 years ago—engineers had no options but to work inside massive aerospace firms, toiling away on small minutiae of aerospace projects that may never make it past the drawing board. And for most of their careers, they’d remain far away from any hardware that actually flew. But these days there are options—private space companies working on a plethora of spacecraft and launch vehicles.”