A Day in the Life of a Principal Space Architect | Hacker News Reader

A Day in the Life of a Principal Space Architect

elpha.com

35 pointscbcowans20 comments

Hi HN! I'm the founder of Elpha.

One of our members, Isa Peterson, is a Principal Space Architect at Tesseract Space. I noticed her job title on her Elpha profile and had no idea what her job was, but I was intrigued. So I asked if she'd write up a post telling us a more about it. As it turns out, her job is pretty interesting. Hope you enjoy!

Hi HN, I’m Erik CEO at Tesseract. Tesseract went through YC in Summer 2017 and builds in space propulsion. Please reach out if you have any questions

Hi HN readers! If you have any questions, I'll be lurking and here to chat :)

nice! i have job title envy now :-) have you seen https://youtu.be/THNPmhBl-8I

I say go for it and make it your title too ;) That YouTube link made me literally LOL - bookmarking.

So your propulsion systems are all designed for vacuum? How does one fully validate such a system on the ground?

[edit] Also: what are the trade-offs in scaling by bundling several thrusters together vs building a bigger thruster?

Great question - the prop systems are designed to inevitably operate in vacuum, so we ground test at atmosphere first to verify the hardware performance and then test the system in a vacuum chamber to simulate space.

[edit]: Both options of thruster choice make sense for different missions so it starts with customer conversations usually. We'll work with a customer to understand their mission requirements and then design a system to match. Some of the things feeding into the trade would be the mass of the spacecraft, how fast the customer needs to get to orbit, the footprint we can take up externally, and any preferences for redundancy. I'll also look to see if I can build a system with existing thrusters vs. designing a new one. (For example, if the customer wants 48N of thrust, I would suggest using 2 x 22N thrusters and getting close to the goal instead of designing a custom engine)

Wow awesome. How can people without computers (Africa) can learn space engineering and orbital mechanics if he can not play KSP and also there is no education for it?

Fascinating!

Do you get to watch launches on-site for satellites that carry engines that you worked on? :-)

Hopefully! I've always wanted to go to Launch Base, but haven't had the opportunity yet.

It seems fitting that someone who works on rocket engines would be called Isa.

Agreed - and the pronunciation is the same as ESA!

So is he an aerospace engineer or a principal space architect? His first sentence seems contradictory.

Aerospace engineer is a profession. Principal Space Architect is a role.

She is both.

sjburt nailed it - and "she" ;)

Apologies. Looks like HN does not allow me to edit. :(

In a space agency a Principle Space Architect would be responsible for constellation design and acquisition- they'd rarely get their hands dirty with constructing their own powerpoint slides, much less chemical handling. Presumably this is much further down the stack, so to speak.

That's honestly one of the reasons I moved out of "old aerospace" - it's so easy to get pigeonholed and it becomes easier for people to stop learning.

I agree, at least when it comes to overspecialized roles in large companies.

If you didn't get to actually Do anything, are you really a rocket scientist anymore? Does it feel the same? Does it make you excited to do your job?

Your day sounded pretty amazing to me. Well done!

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