Cowboy Space and the Arithmetic of Forty to Sixty

It is a Wednesday evening, the part of Wednesday where the light in my kitchen has gone the color of a manila envelope nobody important sent, and I am eating cereal out of a mug because every bowl I own is in the dishwasher, which is running, which means I am also listening to a small appliance digest my decisions. This is the hour at which I read the news. I do this to myself voluntarily, which is its own diagnosis.

The headline, when I find it, is on GeekWire and it concerns a company called Cowboy Space. Cowboy Space has raised $275 million. Cowboy Space is hiring between forty and sixty employees for a new satellite and rocket hub in Seattle. Of its 41 open positions, 18 are in Seattle, and they want people who do avionics, mechanical engineering, spacecraft design, and software. I read the name Cowboy Space three times to make sure I have not invented it inside my own head, the way I sometimes invent extra steps on a staircase. I have not. It is really called that. Someone signed a check.

I want to be clear that I am not against Cowboy Space. I have no standing to be against Cowboy Space. I am a man eating Cheerios from a coffee mug. But there is something about the phrase "satellite and rocket hub" that lands in me the way "finished basement" lands in me, which is to say it sounds like a place where someone is going to be slightly too cold for slightly too many hours, eating a protein bar in front of a screen, while above them, theoretically, the sky is doing something. Eighteen people in Seattle are about to have a very specific Tuesday.

I keep thinking about the name. Cowboy. As if space were a frontier, as if there were cattle up there, as if the men doing this had ever in their lives been on a horse and not, more accurately, in a Patagonia vest in an open-plan office with the carpet color of a hotel that does not advertise on television. I am being unkind. The engineers are probably lovely. The engineers are probably better at being alive than I am. The engineers have 401(k)s and partners and a working relationship with at least one dentist.

The thing I cannot stop thinking about, though, is the gap. Forty to sixty. The company itself does not know how many people it needs, only that it needs an amount of people, somewhere between two numbers, the way I know I need to drink some amount of water today, somewhere between zero glasses and the correct number.

The dishwasher clicks off. The kitchen is suddenly the quietest room in the Pacific Northwest. Somewhere, a satellite I did not consent to is being designed by a person who has not yet been hired. I rinse the mug.

Source: GeekWire