One Giant Leap for Space Exploration

Transcript

STEVE HENDERSHOT

You don’t need to be an astronaut to be fascinated with space or to marvel in wonder at the cosmos. You just need to look up at the night sky. Yet some teams do get to take that fascination to the next level. Case in point—the European Space Agency when it launched a new satellite into orbit.

JOSHUA SANTORA/NASA

Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero. And liftoff of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, continuing a legacy of ocean observation and international collaboration to benefit all humanity.

PIERRIK VUILLEUMIER

Finally, the launch goes, and then it’s [a] very, very special moment. This is the result of many years of work by many people. And you’re watching this nice rocket going up in the sky, and eventually you hear that the separation signal has come through and you know the satellite is in orbit. And now, it’s up to it to demonstrate its value.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

And now, more private companies are joining these global agencies—sometimes even in joint missions—to explore space. And they’ve had some extraordinary achievements, like the moment when Virgin Galactic’s team made it to space for the very first time.

JERMEY GAJADHAR

The first space flight was Flight 15 back in December of 2018, and I was in the management overflow room. I used to sit on the propulsion console. We had had projections back there that, “Hey, look, we might get to space on this flight, but it’s a prediction.”

VIRGIN GALACTIC

Three. Two. One. Release, release, release. Fire, fire. 264,000 feet. Welcome to space, Unity.

JERMEY GAJADHAR

After the flight, all the emotions kind of came rushing into me. We made it. What a ride. What an accomplishment. What a great team that surrounded us to make this happen. And I just couldn’t believe that I had the opportunity to be program manager for this. Talk about a pinnacle of a career experience.

NARRATOR

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

We’re living in a new golden age of spaceflight, an era marked by the rise of commercial space ventures such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, working alongside traditional, government-funded space organizations.

It’s been a glorious year for space projects. China, the United Arab Emirates and the United States all made it to Mars and are now exploring the red planet. Bezos and Branson flew to space in July, and in September SpaceX sent the first all-tourist crew into orbit.

There are some bona fide project heroes working to ensure all goes to plan, and today we’re going to meet a couple of them. One is from one of the long-established players, ESA, the European Space Agency, and the other is from Virgin Galactic, one of the upstarts.

We begin in Mojave, California, with Jermey Gajadhar, program manager for Virgin Galactic’s signature vessel, the VSS Unity.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

When you joined Virgin Galactic, it was still just starting out—and obviously needed to develop ways to turn its vision into reality. How did you go about building that foundation?

JERMEY GAJADHAR

Just thinking about my PMI training, part of the things that I’ve helped with is cost management, time management and risk management. From a cost management standpoint, I was honored enough to be one of the first people to help put together the budget templates that we use for Unity. Early on, we had to home grow some of our tools. So creating the budget, tracking actuals and projecting future spend as a startup—having that background and PMP helped me facilitate those sort of conversations and create those tools. At a startup, you may not have all of that detail or that level of situational awareness and being able to take those and apply them to what we’re doing to further propel us forward.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Is the whole thing solidifying over time? I’m just thinking, because what you’re making is new. These projects are new. So, whether it’s risk register, timeline stuff, budget stuff, they’re just harder to predict than they will be 10 years from now—and probably exponentially easier than it was two years ago or something like that. So, what’s that kind of maturity curve been like?

JERMEY GAJADHAR

I had never been on a project where you start at the grassroots and in the private sector, just working on something and then taking it all the way. I’ve been along that journey, and it’s been really cool. [The] thing to realize is not only were we building a product—we were building a company at the same time. So, we were putting together the infrastructure, the processes, the manufacturing—how we do operations? What does missions integration look like?

While these are not unique ventures when you think of Blue Origin or SpaceX, there’s really not a clear playbook on how you do this. How do you lead a team through this sort of gray space? The thing that I’ve tried to apply is margin, right? As a project leader, you’re constantly looking ahead and asking yourself, how do I build margin into what we’re doing? How do I protect it when there’s really no good source data, as you alluded to, to what we’re doing? You can find a recipe book, say, to make a fighter jet—well known, well beaten path. But a rocket-powered glider that folds in half? That’s kind of a one-of-a-kind vehicle, right? So, I think we’re doing a really good job of working through the flight test program, marching through it with a healthy appreciation of what risks should look like, how should we retire those risks. I think the chapter’s pretty much closing right now on the flight test program, and we’re getting closer to commercial operations. I’m really looking forward to that next step.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What’s an example where your project leadership knowledge helped you identify or solidify something that might otherwise have been either insufficiently addressed or missed altogether?

JERMEY GAJADHAR

One of the examples I would give is that risk management is something that you have to be really careful about as a startup, going to a public company and making sure that you’re very calculated in your approach. Space is a challenge. And for most companies, finding a way to do that in a sustainable and regular cadence is really uncharted territory. So, we’ve had to path find our own scope, our schedule and cost approaches for Unity.

Another example of risk management is that we take a grounds-up approach to retiring technical risks—starting at the component level, working to the system level and, lastly, the aircraft level. The apex of this is flight test, where you have to manage the balance of exploring analytical envelopes to ensure that your models are accurate.

Like most flight test organizations, if you’re familiar with them, we use a buildup approach where you take small incremental bites into a commercial envelope. We have a recipe of test points where the engineering team needs data to close those. We package those into flight test cards and establish the number of flights we need to complete, and then we train for those flights. During those flights, you may learn something new, you may uncover that your model was unconservative or conservative and, as a result, you might need to change your vehicle or not.

So that kind of ties back to how do you protect, how do you have margin for issues that you find throughout your vehicle’s life cycle? I think this is foundational to any vehicle, and as Unity moves closer to commercial operations, we’re closing out that last chapter of our flight test program, which is basically ensuring through operational demonstration that not only we’re making a vehicle that goes to space, but we’re also making a vehicle that gives folks the breadth of space—that transformational experience for those that want to join us.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

In 2021, you passed what seems like a pretty seminal milestone when the VSS Unity with four passengers aboard, including your founder, Sir Richard Branson, went to space. Tell me about your experience during that flight—what was it like to see this thing you’ve poured so much into finally come together in that way?

JERMEY GAJADHAR

This one was probably the most emotional one for me. This was Unity Flight 22. Our pipe dream at the very beginning was that we were creating a product and a company to help our founder, Sir Richard, achieve his dream, which was that one day we could open up space to humanity.

This was it. This was that flight. We did it. We flew Richard, we flew with three other mission specialists, Beth, Sirisha and Colin. And at the same time, we anchored in another important business objective—we were able to fly human-tended payloads and demonstrate our commercial cabin experience. So as a project person, you’re always looking to see that what you’ve invested in is coming to fruition, right? And this is yet another sort of anchoring moment for me that we’ve done this.

Now, there are a lot of folks that were like super, super happy and all of this. I was still sort of taking it in. I just didn’t know how to respond. When you’ve been looking forward to this for so long—and this happens—how do you react to that, right? Because in my head, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, we just did this thing. I can’t believe it.” But then where it really hit home for me is I got to see some of the playback videos of the flight, of the people in the cabin. The smiles on their faces, the joy that they had, just seeing them just playing around, spinning, passing each other back and forth—as one of those folks that have been working on this for a long time, I was very proud. It had validated to me that all the hard work—the years, the days, the nights, the weekends—were all worth it just to see our friends enjoy that experience and view of the planet.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Now that this huge milestone of manned spaceflight is in the rear view, what does the roadmap—or whatever is the space equivalent of a roadmap—what does the future look like for the VSS Unity team?

JERMEY GAJADHAR

I really do think that commercial space flight is going to be a just untapped market, to be honest with you. And I think our vehicle really opens up a sector of it that will provide an avenue for science and for research and for astronaut training, as well as giving folks a view of our planet that I truly think will imprint upon their future actions. I think it’ll be that catalyst for change for them.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

So commercial space companies are making moves, but government agencies are still active—and often even teaming up with other private and public players.

Projectified®’s Hannah Schmidt spoke with Pierrik Vuilleumier, the Sentinel-6 project manager at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. Sentinel-6 is part of Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation program. The project includes building two satellites—launched five years apart—that measure sea levels and how they change over time. As you heard at the top of this episode, the first satellite in the project launched in November 2020, and it’s now sending back data to climate researchers, weather forecasters and more.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
HANNAH SCHMIDT

So, ESA is working with several partners on the Sentinel-6 project. How has your team best collaborated across agencies?

PIERRIK VUILLEUMIER

When you put together so many organizations with such a long heritage, we all have our habits, our institutional rules, etc. So the first reaction is say, well, we have to be careful working together. But in reality, once we have set all our common goals, the roles and responsibilities on papers—these are, let’s say, ruling papers set by all agencies—then every organization knows what it has got to do.

I think the magic is really, in the end, with the people. We have established excellent collaboration at [a] personal level with all the teams. This is, to me, the recipe to really overcome any differences that may come from different habits we have developing a space program. So in the end, I think this has allowed, first of all, [us] to launch on time, and to get the excellent results we get now in orbit. This is really a success story.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

The first satellite was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. What’s it like working with all these established global space agencies and then adding a private, relatively younger company into the mix?

PIERRIK VUILLEUMIER

The first thing to say is that in the collaboration among the partners, NASA has been in charge of procuring the launcher. So of course, NASA comes with its own way of doing things with its institutional role and habits. The launch campaign, for example, has been run together with SpaceX. Nevertheless, when you interact with a young company, as you said, you realize that, in the end, the problems that you solve every day, they are the same. The problems are the problems, and whether you come with a long tradition or with a new company, you have to solve those. And maybe what is worth noticing with a more new space-type company is the reaction on the problem solving.

I can mention, for example, that a few days before our nominal launch date, there was a launch abort in Florida from another Falcon 9. Very quickly, it became clear that some engines had to be swapped from the launcher which was allocated to us. And then immediately, SpaceX went through and swapped those engines and retested everything to full satisfaction, and this had only a 10-day impact on the launch date in the end. So, I think this is remarkable, and this maybe shows a difference between an institution and maybe a more agile, younger company.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

And that first satellite launched in November 2020. Now earlier that year, the pandemic started to spread worldwide. How did COVID-19 affect the project, especially as that launch date got closer and closer?

PIERRIK VUILLEUMIER

When COVID came out, immediately we were fearing an impact. And I think this has been the main surprise for me—the reaction of the teams. People having to work in special hours not to meet other people, to avoid contamination, all these. And then we invented also different ways of testing the satellite. Normally we test a satellite, really, next to it. Because of COVID, this could not happen. So, we have put in place some capabilities to actually test the satellite remotely.

And all these little things which everybody invented on the spot allowed the schedule to continue. I’m very proud to note at the end that COVID didn’t affect the launch. So, we’ve kept the launch. In fact, the launch date was set five years ago, and we’ve kept it throughout. I think it’s really down to the people, again, that we could do that despite COVID. Everybody has put a lot of himself or herself to really work around the constraints, and then keep going.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Space projects span years. How do you and your teams work to be agile when problems come up? And how do you best problem solve as you work toward that deadline which could be several years off?

PIERRIK VUILLEUMIER

That is the essence of a space project. So, of course, at some point, you face some small—or large—problems, and you have to face them. Every problem is different. But in the end, what is very important always for a problem is to identify the root cause—why is this problem there? And once you know the root cause, then you can also define what is the corrective action for it. So sometimes problems are small, and we even decide to live with them, because the impact on the mission is negligible or it can be compensated elsewhere, and we continue. Some other times, we need to repair, and you have to realize that the spacecraft is made out of many, many pieces. So, of course, if you repair one piece, it’s getting later. But you can overcome an impact on the end date by reshuffling the activities on other places to make sure that the activities keep progressing, despite the problem you face.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

Why are these projects so important? Why should teams continue to go to space, whether it’s with satellites or manned missions?

PIERRIK VUILLEUMIER

Well, space projects are various. Some people are looking up for astronomy, and some people like us are looking down on the Earth. Almost every day on the news, you see that global warming is a problem, is something humanity is facing. And then, when you dig, you realize that the scientists tell us many variables essential to measure, to monitor this global warming, can only be measured from space. So having measurement systems in space to inform the population, inform the policymakers about the state of the Earth in different domain, then to me, this is justifying completely the reason of keeping those satellites and producing new systems—in the end, delivering essential data for mankind.

MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT

The exploration of the final frontier has entered a new phase—one that promises to open up spaceflight to more people and help us better understand what’s happening here on our own planet. Behind this wave of innovative projects are teams working to ensure that these amazing journeys into outer space are safe, effective and efficient—and that they maybe make life here on Earth a little better.

NARRATOR

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