Sept. 3, 2014
By Lexi Shurilla, fightingillini.com staff writer
Former offensive lineman Ryan McDonald took his first plane ride with his dad in second grade and knew right away that's what he wanted to do with his life. Once in college at the University of Illinois, McDonald managed to maintain top grades in the aerospace engineering program while also being a part of Illinois' offensive line. The skills he acquired at Illinois helped get him to California for football and then helped transition him into his career at SpaceX - a company revolutionizing space technology.
McDonald's family had just moved and he was about to get his first taste of flying. He hadn't intended to wind up working with rockets; he liked space a bit, but was much more interested in airplanes. He says that every little kid that likes airplanes wants to be a fighter pilot at some point but when you get to be 6'4" and 260 pounds, you change that plan a little bit.
"I remember staring out the window while we were flying and watching the wings and the flaps and was like, `Wow, this is really cool, I want to do this,'" McDonald said. "So I decided I wanted to be an engineer and I wanted to build airplanes."
Born in Ohio, and later moving to Holland, Michigan, McDonald had history at Illinois. His father Phil played center for the Illini from 1974-76. Ryan was a two-time second-team All-Big Ten selection, was twice named a first-team Academic All-American, earned the 2008 National Football Foundation Scholar-Athlete Award and tied Illinois' school record for most starts by an Illini player with 48, equaling Tim Simpson's mark.
While at Illinois, the aerospace engineering major didn't sleep very much between his football and strenuous class schedule. McDonald pretty much never had time to relax between classes five days a week, football practice and finally trying to catch his breath on Sundays. Luckily, he had a good group of friends in the aerospace department, so going to classes and studying was much easier with a group of study buddies. He learned to budget his time well and be more diligent, both of which are useful skills he carried over after his time at Illinois.
After completing his bachelor's degree and graduating summa cum laude in May 2008, McDonald continued his education in aerospace engineering at Illinois. Being able to leave Illinois with two degrees and be completely debt free coming out of school was a huge blessing for McDonald, and something he wouldn't have been able to do without football.
What is SpaceX?
The `Midwestern kid' always said that there were two places in the country that he didn't want to live, one was New York and the other was Los Angeles. Today, McDonald finds himself near the heart of Los Angeles, in Hawthorne, California, working on the next generation of commercial space travel with the privately owned space company, SpaceX.
It was actually playing football that got McDonald out to Southern California in the first place. As an undrafted free agent with the San Diego Chargers, he played with them for a year-and-a-half on their practice squad before trying arena football, but found that wasn't as much fun, so he went back to San Diego to begin his post-football career.
McDonald got his first chance in engineering as a contractor with Pratt & Whitney, an American aerospace manufacturer with global service operations, widely used in both civil aviation and military aviation. A year into his career, a friend from Illinois told him about a company he had been working with, SpaceX. McDonald received an internship with the company for a couple months and was quickly moved to full-time status.
SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.
"The ultimate goal of our founders is to put people on Mars and actually colonize Mars, which is very audacious," McDonald said. "We're taking baby steps to get there and really, we're making pretty good progress. We've developed a launch vehicle that we currently use to both send satellites into space, and at this point it's been all commercial satellites but we're in the middle of being certified to launch government satellites through the Air Force. We've also developed a capsule, which is a cargo resupply capsule for the International Space Station."
SpaceX has gained worldwide attention for a series of historic milestones centered on its three space vehicles. It is the only private company ever to return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, which it first accomplished in December 2010, and is the world's fastest-growing provider of launch services.
In recent years, the United States has been sending American astronauts on Russian rockets, which costs a lot of money. Right now, SpaceX is working to bid on a NASA contract to develop America's own space transport. It won't be a shuttle; it will be a version of SpaceX's cargo capsule that is outfitted to carry people. McDonald is helping to develop the life support system of that capsule. The Commercial Crew Program started in 2010, and SpaceX is competing for funding with the likes of Boeing and other competitors. NASA will give its final award in September of 2014, and the funding will be appropriated as the winning company reaches NASA's development milestones.
In hopes that SpaceX is granted the funding from NASA, the company's CEO Elon Musk is thinking that SpaceX could probably have a manned flight happening in about two years. The entire process takes about five years for the design, development and testing before finally sending someone into space. To start, the contract would be with NASA so most likely those going to space would be NASA scientists, with SpaceX as the operator.
"SpaceX is really cool with pushing the bounds of a lot of stuff," McDonald said. "We're doing a lot of stuff that no one else has ever done before because nobody thought it could be done. You have to spend all this time developing a rocket and they're only one time usable and our whole goal and the way that we can foresee making space flights affordable and practical is to be able to reuse everything."
SpaceX has developed the first stage of its rocket, which is virtually a large cylinder. After the rocket is launched into orbit, the first stage is it turns itself around by firing its rockets again to slow down and then there's a whole navigation system that will allow the rocket to land back on the launch pad. They've done testing to the point where it's been able to land softly in the ocean and they're getting to the point where in a couple flights they will try to put it down on ground.
At some point McDonald thinks it would be nice to go back to the Midwest, but he is truly enjoying being a part of something so new and monumental in space travel. Maybe he would go back to his original dream of working with airplanes, but for now, developing a rocket that has the reliability of an airplane is "pretty stinking cool" in his opinion.
"That's the comparison that our founders made," McDonald said. "No one thinks twice about flying an airplane and we want it to be the same way with our rockets. You expect an airplane to function properly, and they usually do, and it's by far the safest mode of transportation. We want our system to be that reusable, repeatable and dependable, and that's what we're going for.
"We'll see what happens. I feel like it's been as much of a journey of faith to this point more than anything else, going from place to place and getting to do really cool stuff, and I'll be open to whatever comes in the future."
Check out all of the updates of SpaceX at http://www.spacex.com/.
