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!
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?
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.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 54.9 ms ] threadOne 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!
[edit] Also: what are the trade-offs in scaling by bundling several thrusters together vs building a bigger thruster?
[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)
Do you get to watch launches on-site for satellites that carry engines that you worked on? :-)
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!