What life is like working in a particular role and typical day
Life in a space startup is what you might think, dynamic and highly demanding! Though the space industry may be renowned for its slow and costly approach, New Space companies such as SpaceX, RocketLab, and ispace are working hard to change the stigma and promote a faster, cost-aware, and ambitious commercial environment. Though risks may be higher, achieving reliable technical and programmatic KPIs is promoted and this mindset resonates with all actors in this nascent sector, including myself.
As a systems engineer my role is to gather several inputs from the subsystem experts of our technical products – including but not limited to the thermal, mechanical, and navigation engineering disciplines –, and advise the best overall solution that meets all objectives, complies to project-level and technical requirements, and is flexible enough to accommodate a varying suite of customer payloads. On a daily basis I often coordinate configuration management and change activities, consult with the relevant stakeholders (from customers to managers and engineers) in order to track baseline deltas and asses their impacts to flow down to the relevant field. I also employ and maintain collaborative tools for performing requirements management, functional analysis and system decomposition activities.
