Hans Koenigsmann: From Falcon 1 to the Kármán Line

Hans Koenigsmann was SpaceX employee #4 and the company's first VP of Avionics, Guidance, Navigation and Control, and later its chief engineer for launch and VP of Flight Reliability. He spent nineteen and a half years at SpaceX before retiring in 2021. In November, he flew to the Kármán line on Blue Origin's New Shepard alongside Michi Benthaus, the first paraplegic astronaut.

Jeff and Hans first crossed paths in the small-satellite world of the 1990s — Hans in Bremen, Jeff at Surrey — before reconnecting when Jeff joined SpaceX as Hans was handing off avionics to focus on systems.

In this conversation, Hans recounts the post-Falcon-1-Flight-3 meeting where Musk told a near-broke team they had six weeks to launch the fourth and final rocket. He explains why GNC at SpaceX owned its own hardware instead of writing specs and tossing them over the fence. He talks about pulling Gwen Shotwell into the company, scuba diving with Musk at Kwajalein, and the peer-review line that became his personal benchmark: resilient and unfazed by ambiguity or changes in strategic direction.

And he describes what it's like to trust someone else's rocket — and what the ride felt like. A glance into something that's way bigger than you thought.