Notable People

Founders, engineers, union leaders, and one catering supervisor who welded a complaint to a shuttle. The people who made GOW.

GOW is its people. Always has been. The company’s official archives are famously inconsistent on dates and technical specifications, but they are remarkably good at remembering the individuals who shaped the place — even when those individuals would prefer not to be remembered.

Arthur Penrose

Co-Founder (2026)

Structural engineer. The sort of man who, upon being told something was impossible, would nod thoughtfully, finish his tea, and then do it anyway. He spoke in short sentences, believed that most problems could be solved with sufficient welding, and was, by all accounts, correct about this more often than probability should allow.

Penrose came from the offshore wind industry on the Humber estuary. When his employer ceased to exist on a Tuesday afternoon — through a series of management decisions each individually defensible but collectively catastrophic — he and Maya Khatri converted a disused fish-equipment warehouse into a workshop through the simple expedient of putting tools in it and refusing to leave.

His approach to engineering can be summarised in three words: make it stronger. GOW’s legendary over-engineering is, in many ways, Penrose’s lasting gift to the company. He believed that the universe would always find a way to apply more force than you expected, and the only sensible response was to build things that could take it.

Maya Khatri

Co-Founder (2026)

Systems engineer. Critically, the sort of person who could look at a tangle of wiring that would make lesser engineers weep and see not a problem but an opportunity to make it worse in a way that somehow worked better.

Where Penrose built things to withstand force, Khatri built things to work together. She had a gift for integration — taking components that had no business talking to each other and making them not only communicate but occasionally cooperate. If Penrose was the hammer, Khatri was the thing holding it all together.

A quote is widely attributed to her — something about engineering, tea, and miracles — though she always denied saying anything so sentimental. The attribution persists. GOW’s archives are inconsistent about many things, but they are consistent about this: the company would not exist without both founders, and anyone who tries to credit one over the other will be corrected, firmly, by anyone who was there.

Dorothy Huang

First Shop Steward, The Union (2200)

When the Amalgamated Union of Orbital and Interstellar Engineering Workers, Fabricators, and Associated Trades was founded by unanimous vote of GOW yard workers on Grimsby Station in 2200, Dorothy Huang gave the founding address. It consisted of six words:

“Right. That’s that sorted. Back to work.”

The motto adopted at that meeting — “So, that’s that then.” — has remained unchanged for over two centuries. Every subsequent attempt to update it has been voted down by workers who feel it covers the essentials.1

Huang served as Shop Steward for thirty-one years. Her approach to management relations was pragmatic, direct, and informed by a deeply held belief that most disputes could be resolved by getting everyone in a room, putting the kettle on, and refusing to let anyone leave until it was sorted. She was right more often than management found comfortable.

Her email address, it is noted, has still not been deactivated — seventy years after the fact. IT has been meaning to get around to it.

Edwin Marsh

Catering Supervisor, Whistleblower (2298)

The man who uncovered the Great Tea Scandal. Marsh had been submitting complaint forms for eight months about substandard tea procurement. The forms kept being returned with notes saying they had been “filed for review.”

Marsh eventually bypassed the system entirely by welding his complaint to the exterior of the CEO’s personal shuttle.

This was technically a disciplinary offence. He was given a commendation.

His actions led to the downfall of the entire board of directors, a forensic audit that uncovered irregularities in biscuit procurement, and the establishment of the Office of Beverage Standards. The story has become one of GOW’s most cherished legends — proof that the system works, provided someone is willing to get a welding torch involved.

Ellen Moss

Senior Fabricator

Forty-one years with the company. Approximately eight hundred kilometres of hull seam welded. Sixty-three apprentices trained. An estimated fourteen thousand cups of tea consumed.

She was, by any reasonable measure, a national treasure, though she would have described herself as “alright at joining metal.”

Moss represents a type that GOW produces in reliable quantities: the quiet expert. The person who has done something so well and for so long that the doing of it has become invisible — you only notice when they’re not there. Her apprentices went on to lead fabrication teams across four star systems, and most of them still weld the way she taught them, which is to say properly.

The Others

These are the people the archives mention but don’t elaborate on — names attached to anecdotes, footnotes, and the margins of maintenance logs. I’m still digging.

  • The shift supervisor on Grimsby Yard C during the 2120 incident, whose tea survived the explosive decompression intact, sparking a brief but sincere internal debate about diversifying into mug manufacturing.
  • The lead engineer on the Mk. VII Vacuum-Adaptive Hull (2404), who described real-time stress redistribution as “not bad.”
  • The lead engineer on the Mk. IX (2420), who, when asked how the self-healing microfracture system worked, said “well” and returned to her workshop.
  • The junior procurement analyst who once suggested relaxing the Quad-Seal Standard, and who is now believed to work in a different industry.

As the archives yield more, so will this page.

Keep flyin’.

Footnotes

  1. A 2347 proposal to change the motto to “Workers of the Cosmos, Unite in Solidarity and Collective Bargaining” was defeated by a margin of 4,212 to 3. The three dissenting votes were later found to have been cast by a malfunctioning ballot terminal, bringing the actual margin to 4,212 to 0. So, that was that. ↩