When people think about SpaceX’s hiring formula, rocket science usually comes to mind. But some of the company’s top engineering leaders share a much different background – building student race cars in college.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, several senior SpaceX executives, including Bill Riley, Mark Juncosa and Mike Nicolls, were once members of Cornell University’s Formula SAE team, a student competition where participants design, build and race Formula One-style cars.
Riley, now a senior engineering leader at SpaceX, is set to return to the Formula SAE world as chief design judge at an upcoming competition at Michigan International Speedway. The event brings together college teams from across the country that spend months creating and testing their own race cars before putting them on the track.
His connection to the competition reportedly goes back to his student days at Cornell in the late 1990s. Juncosa and Nicolls followed a few years later, becoming part of the same engineering culture.
The link between Cornell’s racing club and SpaceX has become well known among former employees. Charlotte Kiang, who previously worked at SpaceX and studied engineering at Cornell, said, “There was a mystique around it—the Cornell SAE people, that was a demographic within SpaceX,” as quoted by WSJ.
The racing club is about far more than driving. Students learn practical skills ranging from welding and electronics to manufacturing and problem-solving. Cornell faculty adviser John Callister said, “We don’t have classes in all the things that you have to know.”
That approach seems to match what SpaceX, primarily owned and controlled by Elon Musk, looks for when recruiting engineers. Company leaders have long emphasised hands-on experience, whether it comes from engineering competitions, side projects or personal experimentation.
Former teammates remember Juncosa as someone who was always willing to teach himself new skills. “He was the guy who would grind through that work, to get to that ability to improve something or learn something,” recalled Timothy Reissman, who worked with him on the Cornell team.
Nicolls, meanwhile, helped develop electronics systems for the student race cars and later went on to play a major role in SpaceX’s Starlink business.
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