Ian Brown
I don’t know about you, but for most of my time here at UIUC,I spent them worrying about my future. For three and a half years, this fear pushed me down a path I now know I wouldn’t have enjoyed: pure engineering. This path that would have been uninteresting and tedious to me. It was a path more suited to others than to myself.
Why did I choose this path? Because I thought I had no choice. So I decided to fake it until I made it. At some point though, if we are to live, we have to stop acting, and start living. We have to stop abiding by other people’s preferences—and learn how to hear our own. Only then can we form authentic friendships, and only then can we find work that we love. Once you uncover your true self, people will resonate with you, and you will be a magnet for people who want to help you.
Fear prevents young people from embarking on the adventure of their life. This adventure doesn’t happen on its own: many will not realize this until it’s too late. Self-discovery requires the right amount of introspection, exploration, idleness and action. We easily fall into the trap of “it has to be this way, or else my entire plan will fall apart.” What plan? Did you write it down somewhere? Did you reach it through thoughtful consideration? Was there time?
We work ourselves into the dust, leaving no space for the important questions. Our parents push us along, worried that we’ll be unemployed.Everyone’s in a rush. To where? Nobody knows.
—Ian Brown, How have you spent your tuition dollars?
If you've ever met Ian Brown, you’ll remember.
You’ll remember the way he gets restless when he’s excited, eyes wide, eyebrows raised, jaw hanging in awe, and then, without fail, shouting an enthusiastic, “FUCK YES!” Honestly, you'd think he was a kid seeing the world for the first time, and in a way, he is, always imagining, always dreaming bigger.
He’s the kid who watched Star Trek at five and announced he would invent a warp drive, and even now, he means it.
But under the spark is a longer fight. He grew up holding two realities at once: a loving, protective family and a world that often felt indifferent or worse. The whiplash between the ideal and the real made him cynical for a while, jaded, suspicious that everyone wanted the same small things and no one was truly different. For a time, he tried to numb that emptiness in ways that did not solve it.
Over the years, though, he began to notice how his judgments of others mirrored what he feared about himself. In his words, what you say about other people is a picture of your own worldview. That realization didn’t arrive all at once. It came after he caught bitterness creeping into his own answers and decided to stop feeding it.
The pandemic changed everything. With classes disrupted and hours to fill, he defaulted to action and books, solitude as rehab. Solitude built character, he says; reading stacked new models in his head. And then came another shift: he decided to stop hiding from people who were better than him. A threshold of maturity: choose to be around the truly competent, even if it stings your ego, because that’s how you grow.
At UIUC, Ian started in physics and drifted toward rocketry because it seemed cool. But he found the student rocketry club deeply mired in apathy and nihilism, the very attitudes he'd fought so hard to escape.
Ian had two choices: accept the mediocrity around him or build something entirely new. He chose the latter. With his friend Bartosz Wielgos, Ian co-founded the Liquid Rocket Initiative (LRI) with a simple rule: make something real, fast. They also wanted to create a culture that matched Ian’s idealism. They weren’t just going to build any rocket. They were going to build a fucking rocket, not a solid-fuel rocket like all the other clubs on campus, but a liquid-fuel rocket.
Why liquids? Solids are fireworks: once you light them, the outcome is fixed. Liquids are engines. You can throttle, shut down, restart. That’s why industry uses liquid engines for main propulsion—think Merlin or Raptor—while solids are mostly relegated to boosters or strategic systems (ICBMs) where reliability matters more than flexibility. If you want students who can contribute immediately, you teach them cryogenics, pressure systems, valves, plumbing—the hard parts. That’s the bet LRI made.
Beyond making a rocket, Ian was trying to answer a harder question: How can we create something exceptional? How can it have a soul?
More than a rocket club, deep down, what Ian wanted was a place where people acted before they postured; where creating a first, dumb iteration is sacred; where the default is to seek mentors and get humbled by reality. That meant getting over the fear of exposure, calling people who knew more, asking for help, letting strangers tell him he was wrong. Once, he cold-called SpaceX and ended up with a voicemail from someone willing to mentor him. “You can just do that,” he realized. It rewired his sense of permission.
The rejections came too—three separate SpaceX interview trips, three no’s. Those hurt. But they forced a deeper question: was he shaping himself into the ideal employee for a story he thought he should want, or was he building a life that actually fit his skills and conscience? Ian’s career planning is more like soul maintenance.
Ian worries about big questions: the tension between desire and detachment, whether action is secretly just pain-minimization, and how to build mental models without flattening reality. He’s learned that abstraction always loses something, so you keep your models provisional and test them against the world. That’s why he insists on first iterations. Action clears the fog.
So yes, he builds rockets. But the point isn’t kerosene or valves. The point is the person who got himself from cynicism to responsibility, who learned to trade image for truth, to risk being ordinary in order to become useful, to prefer friends who challenge him to fantasies where he’s the hero. The point is a young man trying to live inside a paradox—ambition without self-poison, ideals without naïveté—and letting that paradox harden him into someone reliable.
Ian Brown will say he’s a “Rocket Philosopher” and laugh, but it’s accurate. Philosophy always came first. He’s a philosopher disguised as an engineer, constantly questioning, constantly dreaming, and relentlessly pushing the edge of what he can imagine.
The last time I saw Ian was in his hometown of Denver. As we drove him to the airport, we passed a billboard, some smug agency line about how Mars isn’t cool, or isn’t possible, or isn’t our problem. Ian’s head swivels a half-beat late, like his brain had to buffer the insult.
He blinked. Processed it. Then twisted in his seat, stared it down through the rear window, and barked, “FUCK THAT,” middle finger raised like a flag. We laughed, but the laughter settled into something quieter. The car went still. Wind hummed around the frame. He looked out toward the horizon.
“Where’s our AMBITION, man?” he said, not to me, not really, just out the windshield, to the species.
A few hours later, he texted me: Back in Brownsville.
I pictured the gulf air—heavy, salt-sweet—floodlights pouring over steel scaffolding, the clack of valves, the hiss of nitrogen, a laptop glow on a face that refuses to shrug. Not a glossy dream. Just fittings that don’t line up yet, sensors reading nonsense, a stubborn valve. Ordinary heroism. Sleeves rolled. Pressure, tolerance, try again.
Because for Ian, the work was never about prestige. It was about telling the truth with your actions. About refusing to become a version of yourself made entirely of pose. He learned the hard way that action rearranges the weather inside your head. You move; the fog thins.
That billboard wasn’t the enemy. It was a mirror. It said: settle. Be reasonable. Sit back down. He couldn’t. He won’t. He’s allergic to the shrug. He wants a life that demands a response.
That’s why he keeps going back to the pad, to Boca Chica nights and the coastal wind and the quiet brawl with reality. That’s why “Back in Brownsville” means what it means: another day near Starbase, another day inside the gravity of SpaceX, another day turning ambition into pressure and flame.
Things You Can Learn from Ian:
- Channel your frustrations into action. If something feels wrong, don’t settle. Instead, use that dissatisfaction as fuel to build something better.
- Worldview is a mirror. How you describe “people” is how you see yourself. Audit that, then update it.
- Seek exposure. Call the scary mentor. Let experts critique you. It shrinks the distance between fantasy and reality.
- Authenticity attracts support. Be honest about who you are, your struggles, and your vision. People resonate deeply with genuine individuals.
- Build culture on purpose. Don’t inherit apathy. Name what you care about. Repeat it. Recruit for it. Make it a magnet for people with similar values and interests.
Learn more
- Ian Brown’s LinkedIn
- Rocket Philosophy by Ian Brown
- Ian Brown’s UIUC Talkshow Interview
- Long-form conversation with Ian on meaning, fear, culture, and becoming a Rocket Philosopher.
The appendix keeps the examples, guides, profiles, and source trails close. The book gives them sequence, context, and a way to turn curiosity into action.