ROM Aerospace

My wife smelled natural gas out back near the property line last year. We called someone who poked around, didn't know what he was doing, and left without fixing it. I eventually found this local gas fitter. He was an older guy who walked the line, found the leak in ten minutes, had it fixed in 90 minutes. He apologized for not answering my call the week before: "Sorry, I've been slammed, and I don't have anyone else." So he's booked solid with more work than he can handle. No website, no employees. It's literally just him, his phone, and 30 years of reputation in Northern Virginia. On paper, this is the "boring business" folks online say you should buy. Older owner with a great book of business, solid reputation, and no succession plan. What's not to like? The problem is that business is that man. His company is a book of relationships and word of mouth attached to his competence. When he retires, most of that business retires with him, unless whoever takes over puts in the years to become the next version of him. There is no shortcut for that. You need to know the work well enough to hire, train, and evaluate the people who are going to do it. Because if you don't understand what good looks like, everyone around you will figure that out quick. Employees, suppliers, subcontractors: they'll size you up and you'll be treated like a mark. That's how these trades work. And unless you're two deep in every critical role, you don't actually have anyone in that role. One guy gets sick, gets fed up, arrested, walks off, whatever, there's no backstop. In a big white-collar organization someone covers. In a five-person operation with one owner-operator, there is no bench. Yes, you could build a great-looking website and online booking for him in a weekend. But none of that is why people call him. They call him because he's the guy who fixed their furnace in 2009, their water heater in 2016, and their gas line last winter. They call him because their neighbor called him ten years ago and told them he was the only guy worth calling. The buy-a-boring-business crowd makes it sound like these old-school operations are sitting waiting for someone with a laptop to come optimize them. But the thing that actually generates the revenue - the trust, the competence, the decade after decade of reliability - isn't a tech problem at all. I'm not saying don't buy the boomer's business. I'm saying understand what you're actually buying. If you think there's an easy button here, the market will correct you quick. Once he retires, the company is going to need a licensed gas fitter. In Virginia, gas fitting is a licensed trade regulated by the state, with three levels: journeyman, master, and contractor. To get started, you typically need about 4 to 6 years of hands-on experience plus some formal training, then you must pass a state exam to become a journeyman. After at least a year working at that level (or with extensive total experience), you can test for a master license, which allows you to supervise work. If you want to run your own business and pull permits, you also need a contractor license with a gas fitting specialty. Overall, it’s a multi-year path with exams and modest continuing education requirements. This sounds like a great career path for a young high school graduate that wants to eventually own his or her own business. It sounds very challenging as an acquisition.

Sky full of stars. Following a successful lunar flyby, the Artemis II astronauts captured this breathtaking photo of our galaxy, the Milky Way, on April 7, 2026.

Elon Musk perfectly explains why fully reusable orbital rockets are insanely hard to build Our Earth has quite strong gravity and thick atmosphere. With known physics, building a fully reusable orbital rocket is only barely possible "If this was a video game, the setting is 'Extreme Difficulty.' Not impossible, but extreme difficulty" Because the physics are so unforgiving, everything has to be perfect. You can't just have a "good" rocket You need: • Exceptionally efficient engines • An incredibly optimized, lightweight structure • Advanced avionics and software • A revolutionary, ultra-light heat shield for orbital reentry There is zero margin for error. This is why making life multi-planetary is the hardest engineering challenge in human history