Reaching for the stars

Space missions are the ultimate projects. What else provokes the jaw-dropping awe of developing an idea from a sketch board to watching it fly to the furthest reaches of the solar system? And project managers are the driving force, uniting disparate teams, navigating perilous risks and getting designs into orbit. They are key to the sector’s ongoing expansion.

“Project managers are the backbone to the whole thing,” agrees Dr Chris Castelli, the UK Space Agency’s (UKSA’s) director of programmes.

Project management in aerospace and defence contributes £1.79bn to the UK economy, according to APM’s Golden Thread report, and this year – the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing – has been one of reinvigorated human interest in the space endeavour.

A space odyssey

It is T-1 day for Will Whitehorn, new president of trade association UKspace and former president of Virgin Galactic. When Project meets him, he is about to take the helm of one of the UK’s most important space organisations at a time of cosmic importance – Brexit, British spaceports and dazzling new technology are all on the horizon. “Project managers are absolutely crucial to the UK space sector, as most satellites are fairly unique still, and each one constructed is a project in its own right,” he says.

Skills and components are sourced from all over the world, often by space agencies working with private companies to feed into a NASA or European Space Agency (ESA) project. “That requires huge depth of project management. As the industry gets more sophisticated, more of these skills will be required,” Whitehorn explains. “I think what is about to happen in the UK sector is very exciting. It’s a situation where, finally, we can not only build satellites, but actually launch them as well, from Cornwall or northern Scotland.”

Numerous rocket and earth-observation companies have sprung up across the UK, joining the traditional telecoms specialism. Major players like BAE Systems, Cobham, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Qinetiq and Virgin are building rockets and satellites, rapidly developing plans to exploit new orbital access from Sutherland spaceport in the Highlands or a horizontal-launch site in Newquay.

Young and exciting companies are thriving in areas including the Harwell Space Cluster, transforming conceptions of what spacecraft look like and what they can do. Huge international projects, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, a Hubble successor, are rarely without British managers, researchers and engineers. “I can’t think of many recent projects that haven’t had British involvement,” says Whitehorn.

Of course, Brexit brings fresh uncertainties. Despite continuing membership of ESA, the UK withdrew from the Galileo satellite programme, an alternative to GPS, after British companies were barred from contracts, and involvement in the Copernicus earth-observation programme hangs in the balance. The British government remains upbeat and ambitious, aiming to capture 10 per cent of the global space market by 2030 – up from 5.1 per cent in 2016/17.

New Horizons

UKSA is responsible for all strategic decisions on the UK civil space programme and provides a single voice for UK space ambitions. It invests and works with companies on major sovereign projects such as the SABRE ‘air-breathing rocket engine’, a much-hyped piece of technology from Oxfordshire’s Reaction Engines. The engine would be incredibly fast in the atmosphere – about five times the speed of sound (Mach 5.4), slashing London to Australia flights to just four and a half hours – and even faster in space (Mach 25), potentially revolutionising orbital access.

UKSA invests about £30m each year in earth observation for environmental protection around the world, and it works closely with ESA on cutting-edge missions. “They are beyond the scope of what one nation could do,” says Castelli. “You’re really going out into the unknown to understand the fundamental questions about the universe and how it evolved.”

Critical to mission success

Project managers are central to the sector, he says. “They are the ones who have to bring together these very complicated pieces of engineering – the design, the development, the building and testing of the hardware and subsystems, and the integration of all this into a final, working satellite.”

Good project managers are adept at not only sourcing and combining the right talent, but also injecting energy and watching out for pitfalls. The irradiated vacuum of space is an unforgiving, inaccessible environment, requiring meticulous attention to detail and a willingness to face potential issues head-on. “If things go wrong in space, there are very few options to fix them. This is why you have to design things to a very high degree of reliability,” says Castelli.

There is a demand for strong project management skills, especially in risk management. “We are dealing with unknowns. We are not building the same satellites over and over again,” says Castelli. “There is quite a lot of focus and attention on managing the risk, really understanding the fundamentals and the technology, and getting to the right level of maturity.” He is particularly wary of ‘black swan’ risks, the low-probability but high-impact events that can scupper spacecraft and ultimately cost billions. Even if a fault is not catastrophic, you can hardly send a technician into orbit for a quick fix.

Nothing is more valuable than starting a project team on the right foot. “You have to create the right culture within the project teams; that is very important. One of the things I have tried to do at the beginning of projects is to really dig down into the fundamentals of the project and overcome optimism bias,” says Castelli. “Often, teams are very optimistic about how quickly they can do something, how regulatory problems can be resolved – the whole basic fundamentals of the programme. I try to make sure my review team really gets into the details, in order to put the right level of reality into the programme.”

Emotions frequently run high in exciting and innovative missions, but Castelli says good project managers keep a handle on it. “You need to create the right culture – one where people feel they can raise their hands and say they think the project is not on track.”

Route to orbit

Major companies often have the most experience in space programmes, working with agencies around the world. State-of-the-art missions supplement commercially focused work like telecoms satellites.

“The experiences from ‘science projects’ can really help our commercial programmes,” says Sarah Macken of Airbus Space in the UK. As business development lead, Macken says her role is to pull together diverse players, including governments, other companies and internal staff such as engineers and technologists, striving to ensure good communication.

“Think of all the elements right from design – a concept, through to winning support, funding, people’s imaginations,” she says. “You have got to do all that before you start developing designs. We have a team of engineers in our company, but also in the supply chain, working out how to get something like the Mars rover to Mars at the right time.

“Project managers are absolutely essential to ensuring that complex space platforms are delivered on time and remain operational for decades. They ensure that space platforms make their launch windows and remain operational for many years to come. A project manager is a team leader, an important voice in the larger programme and an interface with the customer. The sector is going through a transformation, with changes in technology happening much more quickly. Those project managers who are not phased by change will do very well.”

A large company is needed to manage or deliver a range of big programmes, claims Macken – and they do not come much bigger than ExoMars, a collaboration between ESA and Russia’s Roscosmos agency that aims to launch the first European Mars rover in July 2020. Airbus is leading development of the machine, which project manager Van Odedra describes as a complex, mobile laboratory that will move across the surface and retrieve samples for internal analysis – and potential signs of life.

The programme began in 2001, and Airbus started developing hardware in 2013, when Odedra joined. A major part of the ExoMars contract was distributing the work across Europe. “That requires careful management. We need to make sure suppliers have the capability and skills to develop the technology required,” says Odedra.

The complexity and scope of the programme require a certain distance for project managers, he explains. “There’s no way that you can get intrinsically involved in every issue that staff are facing,” he says. “The key is working together with the right disciplines.” For space missions, this means a swathe of engineering talent – software, control, electrical, mechanical and system engineers, insurance specialists, and integration and testing experts. “My job is to encourage them, and to help resolve any issues,” says Odedra.

‘New Space’

Rarely will you find more excitement than at Harwell Space Cluster in the Oxfordshire countryside, where Airbus has a base. There is a “buzz in the air”, says Mike Lawton, founder and chief executive of Oxford Space Systems (OSS), which develops lightweight and compact satellite technology. When Lawton started in 2013, Harwell was home to OSS and four other space companies. Now, there are 90.

“We have achieved quite an enviable critical mass, we have got a whole range of companies, guys stepping out of their bedrooms and setting up their first hot desk, up to mega-companies like Airbus,” says Lawton. “We have a joke that the best resource on campus is the coffee shop, because you inevitably bump into each other. The networking is phenomenal, and it does lead to connections and agreements between businesses. It’s also a great way to recruit.”

Companies at Harwell include aerospace giant Cobham, Reaction Engines and miniature satellite specialist Open Cosmos. Building OSS alongside such a wide range of firms gives Lawton a great perspective on how project management has evolved along with the industry over the last decade or so.

“If you really want to be relevant or have the maximum chance of commercial success, the industry has to evolve a new way of developing technology, and that’s what we are attempting to pioneer at OSS,” he says. “With project management, we essentially take a non-linear approach to developing technology.”

In the past, programmes would have had up-front design analysis before anything was built, but Lawton says ‘new space’ firms like his do not have the luxury of time or very large budgets. Instead, programmes accelerate quickly, and they start building rapid prototypes “to challenge and evaluate assumptions”. OSS also works with new manufacturing techniques and non-traditional suppliers from other industries, such as Formula One, to explore different approaches.

“Historically, the space sector had been all about risk aversion – failure was not an option,” says Lawton. “That was certainly true in the days of very large missions taking a very long time to get through gestation, and of course they were very high value. That dictated a certain type of approach – a highly linear, risk-averse way of managing a project through to fruition.”

He compares the industry with the development of computers from huge, room-filling machines at IBM to the pocket-sized power in each of our mobile phones. The technology is cheaper and does not need to last as long. The same thing is starting to happen in the risk-averse space industry, says Lawton, especially at younger and more agile companies.

“When you move to, let’s say, new space, the appetite for risk is higher,” says OSS head of projects Neil Killoran. While space agency missions might last 15 years or longer, OSS can work on projects lasting just five years. That opens up new approaches. “We can go quicker if, for example, we are using material that is new to the space industry.” If OSS engineers can take a material from an adjacent sector, such as Formula One, they can test and validate the material in parallel, opening up “new degrees of freedom”.

Routes to the stars

There is more freedom from the very start of technology development, says OSS chief operating officer Mat Rowe. “We have an R&D department that has very few controls and boundaries in place. It is almost like a sandpit, an area for engineers to play in. If they want to make things, they can go and manufacture, they can hit things with hammers. We allow the engineers to breathe and create.”

The company also makes decisions further down the line to streamline projects as much as possible. Rowe jokes that, in the space sector, customers are often “paying for the paperwork, not the hardware”. Instead, he says OSS focuses on engineering and makes agreements with clients to produce summary reports and presentations, rather than “documents 200 pages long”. OSS has won many plaudits thanks to its reimagining of how space companies can work, letting it focus on radical and influential new technology.

As companies and UKSA make their tricky ascents into orbit, project managers will have to bring together complex teams and navigate countless risks. Following new space trailblazers like OSS, they will also increasingly have to explore novel approaches, working alongside experts from related industries to find new routes to the stars. Whatever happens in the coming years, the UK space sector is on course for a universe of opportunity.

UK space from 1957 to 2021

2 August 1957
The pioneering steerable Lovell radio telescope scans the Milky Way for the first time at Jodrell Bank

26 April 1962
Britain becomes the third country with an operating satellite as Ariel 1 launches

28 October 1971
The Prospero experimental satellite launches aboard a Black Arrow, the first – and so far only – British satellite carried by a British rocket

30 May 1975
The UK and nine other countries found the European Space Agency

26 May 1991
Sheffield chemist Helen Sharman becomes the first British astronaut

25 December 2003
The British Beagle 2 Mars probe lands on Mars, but fails to deploy successfully

September 2004
Formation of Richard Branson’s commercial spaceflight company Virgin Galactic

1 April 2010
The UK Space Agency is formed

19 December 2013
The Gaia space observatory launches, including a camera sensor built in Chelmsford

15 July 2018
The UK Space Agency selects Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands for the UK’s first ever vertical-launch spaceport

25 July 2020
Planned launch of the UK-built ExoMars rover

June 2021
Planned launch of first British lunar rovers from start-up Spacebit

Project management at the ultimate space agency

Analysing the earth’s wind patterns, mapping lunar gravity, remotely exploring the surface of Mars – Tom Hoffman’s work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has helped expand knowledge about our home planet and the wider solar system. He has had a project management role on four out of eight missions, and he is now project manager for NASA’s InSight mission, which is collecting information on the Red Planet’s crust and the ‘marsquakes’ beneath.

“Each mission that I have worked on was rewarding in different ways,” he says. “On my very first mission, I worked on the Voyager encounter with Neptune. That was an incredible experience, because I got to be one of the first people to see the very first close-up images from this distant and previously unseen planet.

“Fast-forward to InSight, and that was very rewarding from the standpoint of being responsible for the success of a Mars mission. Landing day was very tense, but incredibly satisfying once we knew we had successfully landed on a great location.” Hoffman and colleagues had anxiously ticked off vital steps on a checklist that included atmospheric entry, parachute deployment, heat-shield separation, radar acquisition of the ground – and touchdown.

“The whole process of entry, descent and landing [EDL] involves hundreds of operations working perfectly and on a tight schedule, so the whole time is tense and stressful to the team. If any of these don’t happen as planned, the mission can fail to land successfully,” he says. “To make matters more difficult, even if we see something we don’t like happening, there is nothing we can do about it because, on landing day, the one-way light time to Mars was eight minutes. Since our whole EDL timeline was less than six minutes, that meant that, by the time we started getting EDL data from Mars in the control room, EDL had already finished on Mars and we were essentially experiencing very recent history.

“Just like the entire team and many of the millions of people watching around the world, I was completely ecstatic when I heard ‘touchdown confirmed’. Having worked on InSight for more than seven years, and knowing that some others had worked even longer to get InSight to Mars, I also felt a great sense of pride for what the team had accomplished. Because landing on Mars is hard and even a small problem can be fatal, I also felt relief that everything had worked as planned.”

Trust in your team is key, says Hoffman. “Whenever you embark on a project, especially one that will journey to the stars, you need to have people whom you can count on to be successful. I have been fortunate to work with some truly brilliant people who are as dedicated to the success of each mission as I am. Giving people on your team the freedom to do what is needed to succeed, and ensuring that they have the resources to complete the task, has been a great formula for me to date.”

The international space sector has been transformed by private companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX in recent years, but Hoffman says the industry still has the same “dynamic environment driven by people with great ideas and ambitious plans”. For the project manager, the more people who are interested in space, the better it is for everyone – “there is more than enough space to go around!”

Author: Joseph Flaig