Today, June 27th, marks my 1-year anniversary at Spaceflight Industries1 (SFI) and it’s hard to believe it’s already been a year. I was brought on to build up their validation team and was promoted to Validation Manager three months later. Spaceflight is the first company to successfully convince me to be a manager and so far it has stuck.
It’s been great to work alongside such a passionate and knowledgeable set of engineers, both software and aerospace. Getting to work with Jane and Eric again, in particular, is fantastic. I’ve had to learn a whole different set of terminology and skills being a part of New Space. IBM and EMC have absolutely nothing on aerospace’s use of obscure initialisms or their fascination with waterfall development.
I was excited to be at SFI on September 25th when we launched Pathfinder-1 and subsequently confirmed communication with it & downloaded our first images. It is thrilling to task a satellite to take a picture of the other side of the Earth and get the photo back in less than 2 hours.
The team is hard at work as we take lessons learned from Pathfinder-1 & our first-generation ground systems and build out our next-generation satellite constellation & ground systems. It’s been a fantastic year full of challenges and fun and I look forward to what lies ahead!
1 nee BlackSky — same company, just some marketing/branding changes.
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