Space Projects: Managing Innovation, Risk and Change

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Outer space has never seemed so close—even as government agencies and private companies push ever farther into the final frontier. Whether it’s figuring out how to send people to Mars or revisiting the moon, today’s space projects are resetting the boundaries of what’s possible. And space project teams need to navigate extraordinary complexity with precision. So strap in, because today is all about exploring these initiatives in three … two … one …

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This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Space is becoming a fairly crowded market. McKinsey estimates the value of the space economy at nearly half a trillion U.S. dollars and says it’s growing at about 9% annually. As the cost of launching satellites and other spacecraft continues to fall, governments and private companies alike are looking to make their mark. And 2023 has been a big year for space missions—take India becoming the fourth country to land on the moon.

Of course, space projects and programs can take decades to complete, involve high risk and require massive investments. Our first guest knows this firsthand. Kenny Harris has worked in the space industry for more than a decade, kicking off his career with an internship at NASA as a teenager. Based in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, in the U.S., the 2020 Future 50 leader is now a senior project engineer at The Aerospace Corporation. He’s working on several projects, including a mission within the Artemis program, an international effort led by NASA that plans to return astronauts to the moon’s surface by 2025—and eventually expand human space exploration to Mars. Kenny caught up with Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle about how he has seen the space sector evolve. 

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HANNAH LABELLE

Kenny, the last time you were on Projectified, you were mainly working on satellite programs. Now you’re working on several projects, including a mission that’s part of the Artemis program. Thinking about all your experience, what has been the biggest change you’ve seen when it comes to managing space projects or programs in recent years? And what do you see as the impetus for that change?

KENNY HARRIS

The change I’ve seen is when it comes to even science-based satellite missions, there’s specifically ones that are in low Earth orbit or any orbit that’s relatively close to Earth. There is a higher concern for us dealing with those missions because we know that as the commercial space industry continues to grow and blossom, we’re going to be putting more crewed missions into space, whether those are tourist-type missions or whether it is actually for science-based operations. We know that those crewed missions, in most cases, will have to move through our low Earth orbit, which is already cluttered with a lot of debris and things of that nature, decommissioned satellites from many nations, not just our own. With that additional layer of risk, there has been an additional kind of care when it comes to planning these missions, when it comes to deciding if we actually need to launch these missions, when it comes to what’s going to happen once the mission is decommissioned?

So in terms of the risk landscape that has changed for the space programs, just the risk to humans that will be up there has become a very evident concern for us. And I think the cause of that is our curiosity. It’s the need to explore. It’s the need to understand our planet and what’s beyond it. I don’t fault anyone for that curiosity, but I do encourage us all as a space industry to continue to be extremely cautious; we want to make sure that our i’s are dotted and our t’s are crossed when it comes to doing that.

HANNAH LABELLE

As we’re talking about risks, let’s talk about Artemis specifically. When you’re looking at identifying and tracking, and then potentially mitigating threats when it comes to that mission, how are you doing so while keeping the team and the project open to potential opportunities as well, on that flip side?

KENNY HARRIS

A lot of that comes from lessons learned. There are many, many, many conversations around the identification, the tracking, ultimately the mitigation and the management of both threats and risks separately. And so we don’t take it lightly that we have done a number of missions in the past. The last set of crewed missions that went beyond low Earth orbit into our lunar orbit would be the Apollo missions. There are obviously a number of lessons learned from those missions, but at the same time, it’s a completely different time frame. It’s a different era. There [was] limited technology during the Apollo phase. And on top of that, again, we didn’t have as much clutter and debris floating around above our heads.

So in terms of your question, how we identify and track these risks, it’s from a collaborative space. Space is not owned by just one nation. Sometimes it comes from our allies and our partners in the space industry to say, “Hey, we’ve identified this set of risks to consider.” And on the other side, we’ve considered this set of vulnerabilities. So it’s a very collaborative space where we talk through these risks and identify these risks, and ultimately, put them in this colorful matrix and not shut anyone out to say, “Well, that’s not important enough to go on here.”

We might deem it to be a risk that was mitigated because, for example, this mitigation was put in place two years ago and we’re not worried about it. We literally take a look at everything and have many, many, many review boards to go over these things because, like I said, we’re moving toward that commercial space era, and we want to be almost overly cautious to make sure that we do not have any life-threatening situations.

HANNAH LABELLE

And speaking of, “Oh, we put a mitigation in place two years ago”—these projects and programs span years and take a long time to complete, and that also ups the complexity. So what would you say is the biggest challenge when it comes to this complexity, and how do you and your teams and your partners work to overcome that?

KENNY HARRIS

One of the biggest challenges I would say when it comes to project or program complexity within the space industry is just things move so fast. And the technology moves so fast in the space industry with the new, up-and-coming kind of space programs or space companies. There [are] also new players in the field, and there’s always new objectives that they wish to reach, hopefully in very safe and amenable manners.

So when it comes to the complexity, it’s constantly something new. And like you just alluded to was the fact that these space programs take years and years to not only build but also plan and develop. Taking James Webb, for example—that was two decades during that phase, and then it has an additional two decades-plus of just flying once it’s up there. These space programs that, for example, can be 50-plus years, or a program like a JPSS [Joint Polar Satellite System], which is a series of multiple satellites in a satellite suite that flies two at a time where you’re just launching one satellite after another over the span of three or four years, those programs can last multiple years as well. So when you think about challenge, when you think about risk, when you think about mitigation, it’s important to understand that, and that’s one of the reasons why we have so many conversations around it, because the threat landscape, the risk landscape, can change almost at the drop of a dime. 

HANNAH LABELLE 

Speaking specifically about innovation, how do you and your teams really approach that? And how are you testing, vetting, whether some sort of innovation, whether it’s in a workflow, whether it’s a piece of technology, is ready to incorporate in something that is going to take flight and go to space?

KENNY HARRIS

It’s through collaboration with our scientists and their teams. So what typically happens is our scientists and engineers get together and have these crazy ideas. I enjoy using James Webb as my example for most things. So scientists and engineers have this crazy idea to say, “Hey, you know what we should do? We should look back 13-plus billion years into our universe and study infrared light.” And engineers and scientists go away and say, “How can we do this? Will it be a set of three instruments, four instruments, six instruments?” And throughout the project life cycle, we either scale that up or scale that down based on the limitations or the variables that I talked about earlier: the fluctuation in the space industry; new and exciting ideas that might come out; or limitations, whether it’s that, okay, well, we talked it through and to be able to get this functionality with James Webb, we’ll need to have two additional instruments, but we can’t do that because now the rocket weighs too much to actually put it in space.

And these are some of the trade-offs that we talk about when dealing with innovation. It has to have the right timing. There has been several situations on several missions that I’ve had where we have this grand idea at the beginning in the development phase, and then when we get down to actual implementation, risk analysis, how the instrumentation would function, how much power it draws from the satellite, we have to scratch the instrument because at that time, we realize that we can put this instrument on another mission that goes up and make the one that we’re working on that much better. 

When it comes to actually testing and deciding if we’re going to do it, that again boils [down] into “Is this the right satellite to put it on?” It boils down to “Is the technology functioning on the scale that we hope it to function on?” There could be a five-year planning phase, and we could find out that IR technology, or infrared light technology, has advanced significantly during our initial planning phase of what we wanted on the satellite and now, and we can decide to then implement the new one or we could decide to implement some subsidized version of the newer technology in order to get the mission to where it needs to be and then put the newest version on the next satellite. It’s this big puzzle. We try to just get the right pieces in the right places to get the absolute best mission possible to meet our mission requirements.

HANNAH LABELLE 

What would you say is the biggest project management challenge related to space projects and programs today? 

KENNY HARRIS

One of the biggest project management challenges that we deal with today is something I alluded to earlier with the new players that come into the space and how we effectively collaborate with these new players and also these government organizations to find commonality in our mission objectives and our mission goals. We all have the objective of exploration, of scratching that itch of curiosity, but sometimes there’s not always overlap. So from the perspective of project management and wanting our missions to be successful, I would just say finding the space to make sure that each organization’s goals are met. If we need to have those conversations around which missions take priority, then those are tough conversations to have. 

One of the things we deal with in the space industry is, transparently, our funds. We never know when cuts might be coming to specific projects that might not be deemed necessary at the time. How I deal with that personally, and/or how me and my team deal with that—the most we can do is just continue to do our work and do our work well. We try to present new alternative means of potentially rolling some instruments onto similar missions.

HANNAH LABELLE

How do you think leading space projects and programs will change in the next few years as well as in a longer term?

KENNY HARRIS

I don’t see a ton of changes in the short term for leading space projects and programs. What I do see could be the fact that additional crewed missions are now going to be going to the lunar surface, to lunar orbit, or even further out to the Mars orbit or the Martian surface. There would be more crewed missions, more missions that apply specifically to habitable environments, more missions that are longer distances, further out than what we’ve been working on in previous years. There’s a certain level of care that needs to be taken from a crewed mission, whether it is, like I said, looking into habitable environments, whether that is breathing, whether that is eating, sleeping, and then also the mental health and mental care of your crew. And so there’s going to be a number of aspects that boil into that from the project management perspective, in both the long and the short term, in all honesty.

HANNAH LABELLE

Looking back at your career so far, what would you say is your biggest lesson learned as a project leader or from the perspective of project management? 

KENNY HARRIS 

I can boil that down into three words: impact, curiosity and exposure.

How I view that is the motivation of impact. And what I mean by impact is: What am I doing on a daily basis when I go into these projects each and every day? What am I doing in the mission space to better serve or increase the human experience or human life? Are the programs I’m working on intended to do some sort of benefit for our planet, the only planet that we call home currently, and how are we continuing to build upon technology that we have used in the past?

Curiosity is because it keeps me grounded. Keeps me grounded in why I started this. Staying curious about what we’re doing and constantly stretching the envelope and building upon those technologies that we continue to utilize and pushing the envelope to develop cutting-edge technologies because each and every one of these programs has some new cutting-edge technology that technically, in the planning phases, it might not even exist. 

The last thing would be exposure. And by exposure, what I mean is of the next generation of amazing scientists, engineers, thinkers, world-changers, how are we actively engaging them to prepare them to continue the work that we’re doing? We all need to realize at some point, we’re going to stop working in the space industry. We can’t work in the space industry for an infinite amount of years, and we want to continue to build up the workforce with creative minds, minds that are represented from different cultures and backgrounds and experiences, to continue to guide us to be great leaders, to be great engineers, scientists, whatever your field is.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

We’ve heard how space projects can span decades, and that leaves a lot of time for teams to contend with change—in the space sector and in the tech that’s available for projects. Take our next guest, who spent 15 years leading a multinational team that built a specialized instrument, the Ganymede Laser Altimeter, or GALA. GALA is now on its way to the moons of Jupiter as part of the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission—Juice for short—which launched in April 2023 and is still years away from reaching Jupiter. Here’s Kay Lingenauber, project manager and system engineer at the Institute of Planetary Research at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin. 

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

Kay, we know that space projects span decades. In fact, you’ve been working on the GALA project for a large part of your career. I’m interested in what brought about the initial idea for the instrument. Was it a requirements-based process—you knew you needed the best tool to collect data on Jupiter’s moons—or you had an idea for an instrument and then it found its application? Tell me how this went from two people at a workbench to a team of 160 people.

KAY LINGENAUBER

In this community, many ideas are going back and forth, and now it was time to explore Jupiter and its icy moons. There was a long discussion [of] what kind of instruments should be on the spacecraft to explore the moons. From our institute, we designed an instrument concept for a laser altimeter. And it was then in a competition with other laser altimeters, and we finally won that competition. Once this instrument was selected, the project evolved.

When you have an instrument like this, which is basically starting from scratch, you have the first ideas and numbers on the back of an envelope. In a few years, you have an iterative design process with all the team members coming on board, and you go more and more in detail to have the final flight instrument on the spacecraft, which basically then took from 2013 to 2021, until we have delivered our instrument to the spacecraft, where it then was integrated on the spacecraft and tested together with all the other instruments.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

How much does the instrument change over those eight years, because obviously the team gets bigger and then you go through the entire development process and the rigors of making sure that this will hold up through the mission. Does the development itself happen according to plan at that point, or do the addition of all those people and the innovations and ideas and collaborations change the scope of it?

KAY LINGENAUBER

In space, you have severe constraints on your budgets, and budgets in our business are the mass and the power and the volume and the data rate. When you are developing the instrument, you cannot double the mass because it simply cannot be accommodated on the spacecraft, and you cannot double the power you want to use on the instrument. On the other side, we are constrained by the science performance that the instrument has to deliver. We have to bring a certain laser pulse energy for this type of instrument. The diameter of the telescope has to be [of] a certain size and many other technical issues.

And then you go [down] this path where you have to go into the details. Of course, when you’re doing this, not everything you have planned to do will happen. For example, certain parts which you need for a certain performance simply do not exist or prove not to be [as] good as you have planned them. For example, the radiation environment, which is quite harsh at Jupiter, will simply destroy the part you have intended to use. Then you have to go back a step and find another solution. This is part of the business. Then you have to try to manage this within the schedule, within the cost plan, within the knowledge that you have available in your team.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Your institute was working with agencies across the globe on the instrument itself and the wider Juice mission. How did you structure the instrument project in a way that enabled these teams to work together with complementary scopes of work? 

KAY LINGENAUBER 

In these big or distributed teams, you have to put some formalisms into the teamwork. It comes down to written documents, on contracts and on requirement management. When you have an instrument like GALA, which has basically about 3,000 single requirements coming down from a top-down approach, you have to manage this and have to carefully watch when one partner of your team intends to change a parameter of the receiver chain, of the receiver electronics. You have to see whether this impacts the instrument on an upper level, and you have to check of course whether this is feasible with our Japanese partners who are designing another part of the receiver electronics. This is a back and forth, and from my position, you start with an overall list of requirements that covers the whole instrument and then goes down in very details of the various subsystems which are built by the different team members.

It’s about requirement management and configuration management, which sometimes does not work as you plan because the procedures of these partners are not always the same. You have to incorporate the knowledge about the working culture of the teams. It needs some time to find the way with the different partners, but at the end, it works quite well.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Did you negotiate any of those requirements, or was that just kind of like you take what you’re given from these stakeholders and just find a way to harmonize it?

KAY LINGENAUBER 

We have, of course, to negotiate these requirements because as the leading institute of the instrument, we had to tell our partners what we expect from them, and of course, they told us not everything from our wish list will work. We have to adopt something simply because they cannot do that or the technology is not as good as we intended to have it. So it’s a negotiation. In these space projects, you have to keep in mind that you have a very fixed date at the end. The launch of the rocket which puts your spacecraft into space needs to start at a certain date, or the next launch opportunity may be two years later. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What were some of the steps you took to ensure that the cross-collaboration between your team and teams at other agencies got to where it needed to be for project success? 

KAY LINGENAUBER 

I think this is quite typical as for every team when you work together for quite a time. You have good times and bad times. The trust within the team gets better and better when you do the management quite well and when you convince the team that you trust them as [the] project manager.

Another important point is transparency. When you try to explain to all the partners what is the goal and what is the difficulty in that certain project phase you are [in], and you openly explain [to] them we are, for example, under schedule pressure and we have to hurry up and we have to speed up in order to achieve the next milestone. All the partners see that the whole team is working together—then it’s very beneficial. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT

I find this really interesting—there are really three projects that define large parts of your career. One of those began before you started working, and one of them will continue after you have retired. From a project management perspective, it might be hard to form a full picture of how you should iterate your practices from one to the other. How do you make sure that you are staying up to date and learning what you need to so that your projects run the way they should?

KAY LINGENAUBER 

When you start working in this field as a young professional or as a starter, you learn from your colleagues. You do not design a complete instrument, but you build, for example, parts of the instrument. You learn a lot, and for the next mission or instrument which comes a few years later, you can use what you have learned.

The teams in which we are working in the space business are very large, interdisciplinary teams. So there are different kind of expertise in these teams. For example, a mechanical engineer, an optical engineer, commercial guys, other project managers and so on. To be successful, you have to work in an organization where it is usual that all the team members or the senior staff teaches all the junior staff. It’s part of my job now to teach younger people and to share my lessons learned in terms of science, technology, and even project management and project organization. And because, as you said, it’s mathematically not possible to gain so many lessons learned by your own when you do only a few projects in your career, so you have to rely on your colleagues and how your institute and your organization works and transfers the knowledge from one generation to the next generation of staff and employees.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Space isn’t the only sector with complex projects. How can all project professionals do a better job of managing complexity?

KAY LINGENAUBER 

My advice for complex projects is that you have, first of all, a good team which covers all the needs in terms of knowledge and team size. Next is that you have to do a good analysis of your risks, and you have to track them. In my projects, of course, when you start a project, sometimes it’s not clear how you want to design a certain part of your instrument and whether the technology is ready or whether you have to do a late redesign, which scrambles your schedule and your funding. So you have to be honest to yourself. Write down the risks and be transparent to your boss, to your funding agency.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Thanks for listening to Projectified^®. If you like what you heard, you can listen to more episodes on your preferred podcast platform or visit PMI.org/podcast. And please subscribe to the show and leave a rating or review—it’s always great to hear from you. Hope you can join us next episode!