![]() ![]() ![]() Substitutions for sports like frisbee can happen after a team scores a point this privilege, however, is not afforded to smaller teams who don’t have backup. “We had a lot of overlapping, and we don’t have a huge team,” admits Roberts, adding that PPG had to forfeit a couple of games due to numbers and parking challenges earlier in the morning. Since the brackets were released for the Aerospace Games, she had to scramble to coordinate who would be placed where and when. Her teammate and PPG captain Courtney Roberts stood nearby, resting after a morning full of ultimate frisbee, the relay race, and dodgeball. I’ve seen it all on paper for the customers. She points out that while her company is not necessarily designing aircraft, a lot of its products go to clients like Boeing, SpaceX, and Lockheed, which makes the experience valuable for her and her colleagues. Deanna Stockwell, a 24-year-old research chemist in PPG’s sealant department, donned gloves, sand socks, and a neon yellow shirt with a small blue PPG icon near the frocket before joining her tug of war team. This year was the first time PPG Industries, a global paint supplier, participated in the competition. The Aerospace Games is also open to smaller contractors, who often come to the games with a slight disadvantage in numbers. “We thought it would be a great way to market Deloitte’s offerings in the space force client world,” she says. Savina Dhupar, a 25-year-old Deloitte senior consultant and previous Northrop Grumman aerospace engineer, highlights how the goal of the Aerospace Games is not only visibility for people who work at the same company, but for people who work in the industry. People I've never seen before, they all just came to watch the games and cheer us on. “It’s pretty isolated in terms of what projects you work on. ![]() ![]() Regardless of their role, at Dockweiler, crowds of her gray-shirted colleagues cheered her on. Some worked on Dragon, the company’s private spacecraft, while others worked on Falcon, the orbital-class rocket. She knew one of her fellow teammates, but she had never seen the rest before in her life. “We went out to a field and all put duct tape numbers on.” While only eight people were needed to form a team, 30 people came out, she explains. Sipping water after losing in a knockout round, Sara Montecino, a 28-year-old SpaceX Starlink software engineer, recalls the dodgeball tryouts. “In a deep, personal, emotional way, I knew what it was like being on the outside,” he says. Pride still remains for his previous employer, though he’s switched jobs and no longer competes in the relay races: “We were the third commercial space company to get to orbit after SpaceX and Rocket Lab.” The annual gathering at Dockweiler reminded him of his own journey. Two years of applications later, he received his first yes from Virgin Orbit. He taught himself programming while driving an Uber for a year, handing out résumés at the SpaceX campus. Walking alongside the tents, Ernest Yeung, a 42-year-old flight software engineer at Terran Orbital and a balloon toss competitor, reminisces: “Look at all of these companies that I applied to that rejected me!” Obtaining his master's in theoretical physics in 2014, Yeung had pivoted his career from academia after being inspired by Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Companies budgeted for boxed lunches, and tables displayed satellite models and informational flyers. In late July, for the first time since before the Covid-19 pandemic, the " fun and family-friendly” games returned to Dockweiler Beach, hosted by 2019 winner Northrop Grumman, with " 30+ companies, 6,000+ attendees, and ONE overall champion.” Hundreds of aerospace and Department of Defense workers are bused in, donning colorful T-shirts with their respective employers' names plastered on the front. These are just a few competitions that are part of the annual Aerospace Games in Los Angeles, where employees and interns from SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, Blue Origin, Boeing, and NASA-among many others-compete for trophies and glory. Watermelon eating, tug-of-war, human pyramid, and dodgeball. Now, imagine that scene taking place on a sandy beach near the ocean with a bunch of engineer space nerds. If you’ve ever watched the 2000s teenage-heartthrob movie Twilight, you know there is an iconic thunderstorm baseball game scene between the Cullen Family and other vampires alongside the mere mortal Bella Swan. ![]()
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