Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Space Industry by satsearch - sharing stories about the businesses taking us into orbit.
We delve into the opinions and expertise of the people behind the commercial space companies of today, who could become the household names of tomorrow. Find out more about the companies and technologies discussed on this show at satsearch.com.
Hello, everybody.
0:02
I'm your host, Hal Curtis and I'd like to welcome you to the Space Industry by Sat Search where we share stories about the companies taking us into orbit.
0:10
In this podcast, we delve into the opinions and expertise of the people behind the commercial space organizations of today who could become the household names of tomorrow.
0:19
Before we get started with the episode.
0:21
Remember, you can find out more information about the suppliers, products and innovations that are mentioned in this discussion on the global marketplace for space at sat search dot com.
0:31
Hello to all our listeners out there and welcome to today's episode of the Space Industry podcast by I'm joined today by Laura Crabtree Ceo and co-founder of SAT search member company Epsilon three based in the US.
0:44
Laura is a very experienced operator in the space industry.
0:47
She spent more than 10 years at SpaceX where her work included training and flying the first ever commercial astronaut crew.
0:54
And nowadays she heads up Space engineering and operations software company Epsilon Three, which we'll hear a lot more about in the conversation.
1:02
Laura is also a returning guest to the podcast and she I think she always has a whole range of insights and ideas to share, being the coal face of the industry for so long.
1:11
So I'm really excited to get into the discussion today, which is actually going to be about decision making and agility in space missions to I think increasingly important and like more widely applicable concepts for operations that that people need to take into account, teams need to take into account.
1:27
So, yeah, before we get into it, welcome, Laura, great to have you on the, on the Space industry podcast again.
1:33
Thanks for having me again.
1:34
It's good to be here.
1:36
And I think that's, that's great intro covers pretty much everything.
1:39
And the only one thing I would add is, you know, epsilon three started mostly as operations software, so very end of your program life cycle.
1:48
And we have since been asked by many of our customers to provide a lot more capabilities earlier on the program life cycle.
1:56
So we're getting into a lot of earlier, things like build integration and test and then a lot of the data and analysis portion that comes post operations that feeds back into kind of redesign or any insights you might need on how your operations are going.
2:11
So that's the only thing that has slightly changed since the last time I was on the podcast.
2:16
Ok.
2:16
Excellent, excellent.
2:17
Well, yeah, maybe we can unpick some of those, those aspects during the discussion so well.
2:22
Yeah.
2:22
So before we sort of take a really deep dive into the more technical aspects of the topic, I wondered if you could explain to, to the listeners why decision making is so important and how it is, you know, essential to ensure the end to end success of the, of any space mission.
2:37
Really?
2:38
Yeah, I think the the biggest thing is knowing who is going to make the decisions.
2:43
And let's say for the control room example, who is the person that is in charge of making the decision once he or she has all of the information and then who is responsible for giving that person the information in order to make the best decision possible.
3:00
Because if you have, let's say too many cooks in the kitchen, you're either never going to have a decision on what to do next or you're going to have 10 decisions and you're never going to move forward.
3:11
And so I think with all engineering decisions, especially in operations where things are and can be more time critical.
3:19
You need to have that clear delineation of decision making and then everyone needs to respect that before you go ahead and start an operation.
3:30
So it's, it's just something that I spend a lot of time thinking about.
3:34
How do you have all the information you need to make the best decision possible.
3:38
And so that's why I think it's really pertinent to be talking about it here today.
3:43
Excellent.
3:43
And I'm guessing this understanding the roles and responsibilities is arguably more important when people are remote to each other.
3:53
Yeah, absolutely.
3:54
When, when you have people evaluating data in different cities, different countries, different time zones, the sort of chain of command of how you make those decisions that could be either catastrophically good or bad for your mission needs to be very well hammered out before you do anything and more and more, I see smaller teams that are in lots of different locations working together, which just means that you need to have better means of communication and better means of giving the data to the person who is ultimately making that decision.
4:37
Great.
4:38
OK.
4:38
Yeah, that makes sense.
4:39
So as you mentioned, you've seen you have experience of lots of teams working with them, working, working in them.
4:46
So I wondered if you could give us a bit of a an overview of what the common difficulties you see that are faced by engineers and and other decision makers during maybe the the entire the complete mission development process, you know, operations, execution, design development, whatever it is, what are the common threads that you see?
5:04
So the first thing I think is not knowing who's making decisions.
5:10
The next thing is not having the data that you need in a timely fashion.
5:15
And this would mean somebody has to go to four different databases to create plots to determine what happened.
5:22
This means that you can't find a run data.
5:26
This means you don't have traceability of what part was tested and actually installed on the vehicle.
5:32
I can think of some really good examples of that where if we only had good traceability of the parts and their entire life cycle all the way through operations, we could have deduced what was actually going on earlier in an operation, either a, a ground test or an in flight operation.
5:52
And then last, lastly is, is just people, there's always complications in how people communicate.
5:58
So really standardizing the means by which people are going to communicate and then how the decision is going to be made and then how you communicate what decision you're going forward with.
6:11
So it's true in all stages of a program life cycle.
6:15
But really when you're trying to do more with a small team, some things that I found is that, you know, small teams, everybody wants to be a decision maker because those are the people you bring on to small teams, the people that are really hungry for a lot of responsibility.
6:33
But if everybody has the responsibility, then nobody has it.
6:36
And so even if you have a small team really still establishing who makes the decision and who's communicating.
6:45
It is, is very, very important.
6:47
So I've seen like miscommunications, I've seen missed data packages.
6:53
I've seen delays based on data packages.
6:57
And so that's why I think, you know, knowing where, what data you need to communicate and what data you need to make a decision is, is really important.
7:07
Yeah, excellent.
7:08
Very interesting.
7:09
You bring up the the the personalities aspect of things, you know, because we're talking about technical data, we're talking about objective measurements and metrics and that sort of thing.
7:17
But, but yeah, fully understand that if you're a small team, you, you will likely be attracted to or will attract people who can execute And those people who can execute want as you say, want to make decisions.
7:29
But if that upsets the decision making hierarchy process, that's not necessarily a good thing.
7:35
No, you, you want to empower people to make decisions, but you want to tell them what decisions they have the authority to make before going forward.
7:46
Because what you end up with is 5, 10, 15 maybe people who are all type a personalities, they're all amazing engineers in their own, right?
7:56
And they all know the best way of doing something.
8:00
And in the end, you need to have one person that disseminates what decision is made and those people need to be able to come together and say, ok, that person is the mission director is the test director and is in charge of the successful mission or the successful test.
8:20
And and if you don't have that delineation, you're gonna end up with a lot of people making decisions because like you said, on a small team, you will end up with a lot of type, a personalities and a lot of people who have really deep experience in something.
8:37
Yeah.
8:37
Absolutely.
8:38
Well, and on that.
8:39
So you mentioned the, the engineering team there and operations is kind of different.
8:46
There's, you know, there's real world data going on, there's things coming in, you need to respond to what's happening, that sort of thing.
8:51
But if we were to focus on engineering in the, in the space industry, what are the sort of major challenges that you've seen that this team has to, has to contend with in terms of decision making and like the team at epsilon three or the teams that we support.
9:07
No in, in, in any sort of space mission development, you know, where we're looking at engineering with testing or qualification, those sorts of issues, you know, before operations begin, you know, I think a lot of times it's, it's, it's really simple things like emails and version control.
9:24
So it seems it seems real like so so silly, but people will miss emails and they won't know what's going on because they missed an email and someone will say, hey, I emailed you that drawing or I emailed you the design review charts, why didn't you review them?
9:44
And it's a lack of just knowing what you need to do and, and when you need to do it.
9:51
And so I think then having a lot of, you know, a lot of different tools is also really hard because, I mean, at every company you have 20 different tool sets that people are using software tools, hardware tools and how do you know which one to use and when in the process to use them?
10:11
That's, that's been really hard as well.
10:13
I know in my past life I was always asking people what, what was that tool called again?
10:21
And even like to put in vacation.
10:23
I mean, you just, you, you stack them up and you end up with 2030 many more than that.
10:32
And people forget where they're supposed to do things where they're supposed to track things and they end up going on a notepad and taking notes and then those notes get lost.
10:41
So figuring out what your process is documenting it early and often which sometimes people think, hey, you know, hey, I'm doing this way too early.
10:50
It's probably not too early because you probably already have people doing things on notepads and Excel spreadsheets that you're going to lose later.
10:58
And that's, that's one of the biggest challenges that I, I have faced and a lot of people that I've talked to in the industry have faced.
11:07
Great.
11:08
No, that definitely makes sense that I've experienced that myself in all different areas of work.
11:13
So I definitely agree with you there.
11:14
So, I mean, this may be the ideal segway for you.
11:18
But my next question was how, how do companies use epsilon three to assist in decision making and, and communication during that engineering and, and operational phase and, and whatever else you you feel should be covered.
11:31
Yeah, I mean epsilon three in its core functionality helps teams delineate responsibilities.
11:39
So you can say, hey, the mission director has to do this thing or the flight director or the test director has to do these things or you can say anyone can do these things.
11:50
So it really helps you to determine who can make those decisions and you can give fine grained permission and authority to people for releases, reviews version control.
12:02
So none of those things are then tracked on email.
12:05
They're all tracked in epsilon three.
12:07
So then you just have one place to go for a review of a test documentation or an operation, a an operation itself, you inherently already know what you can and can't do because it's basically locks you out of doing the things that you don't have the authority to do.
12:22
And then on the on the flip side on the end, which is, you know, how do you get all the data?
12:29
We are collecting data and helping people make good decisions on that data.
12:34
And if you need to go back and look at something that happened a couple weeks ago, it's already easily there for you, you can already look it up.
12:42
It's it's not very hard to find.
12:44
So in a lot of ways, we are helping people basically streamline the decision making process for integration tests and operations.
12:52
So they don't have to think about what they're allowed to do what decisions they're allowed to make.
12:56
They, and they can notify if a Q A person or a mission director is not available, you can actually ping them via epsilon three and tell them, hey, I need you to come in and make this decision because I can't move forward unless you tell me what I'm supposed to be doing.
13:16
So those are just some of the ways in which we are helping people make decisions quickly, efficiently and not make errors.
13:25
So I think there's, there's definitely a lot more, but I think those are the things that come top of mind for me.
13:32
OK, brilliant.
13:33
And I'm guessing that having such a, such an architecture with, you know, logs and the history of files and versions and things and as well as, as you mentioned, the, the set boundaries of operations that individuals can, can carry out all it within the system, makes it much easier for these teams to bring on new people and deal with staff turnover.
13:54
Absolutely.
13:55
The, the one thing that's been really nice is we've actually seen some of our, you know, there's a lot of turnover in the industry.
14:03
We've seen, we've seen go from, we've seen people go from one company to another that's using epsilon three and they fold seamlessly into their operation because they already know how things are working it additionally within any specific company that we're supporting, we might support, start supporting the integration and test team, then we might expand to support the operations team and we might expand to support some of the manufacturing teams or some of the other testing teams within an organization.
14:35
And what, what we've been seeing is that it's helping them standardize and then somebody from operations can go to I N T and help and vice versa.
14:46
And so that's been a really nice way to help companies move faster.
14:51
The other thing is that if you have a standard set of operating practices, now you have potentially reusable operations from I N T to, you know, in flight operations.
15:06
And that's been really nice for people to utilize as well because before they'd have an Excel spreadsheet for integration and test saved onto their desktop or uploaded somewhere, then they'd have a PDF for operations and they might have a confluence page where they're tracking everything.
15:26
And so you could see where you'd have five different ways of doing similar things within a certain organization and that might not be the most effective way.
15:38
Yeah.
15:38
Absolutely.
15:39
Absolutely.
15:39
Definitely.
15:40
OK.
15:41
Brilliant.
15:41
My next question is a little bit of a different tack, but I was wondering, you know, considering the sort of increase in involvement of the private sector in the space industry, which is something you're, you know, intimately familiar with.
15:54
Do you think that there are there are governments or public sector organizations that are or, or or can be more instrumental in educating, you know, the commercial private sector about these sorts of solutions of procedures and decision making processes and hierarchies and things, especially given that the governments are kind of outsourcing space mission components from the private sector and, and procuring.
16:17
I think it goes, it's some somewhat goes that way from the government to the private sector.
16:22
But it, I think more often it's going the other way these days where something is developed in the private sector.
16:29
And then the government says, oh my gosh, this is a really good way of doing things I should adopt that.
16:36
We're seeing a little bit more of an increase in questions, traffic from the public sector.
16:45
Now that we have a lot of exposure into the commercial sector, especially with efficiency tools, software packages.
16:55
Traditionally, the government has been really hard to get into because they, you know, require certain things like fed ramp and C M MC that take 16, 18 months, two years plus to acquire those types of certifications and the public sec or sorry, the the commercial sector is, you know, easier to adopt.
17:22
They want certain security measures, they want encryption, they want so two, they want I T R control, but they don't always require a certain level of certification.
17:34
Although we are definitely working towards those certifications because we want to support everyone within the sector.
17:40
That wants to use our software.
17:41
So there's, there's definitely the need out there, but I think it is kind of more recently going the other way interested and, yeah, it's good, good to hear, I think as well from our point of view of, you know, looking at the commercial sector.
17:56
Yeah.
17:56
And I've, I've also been hearing a lot from the different government entities that they want to know what's going on in the commercial sector.
18:04
And they want to adopt a lot of the commercial software, a lot of the commercial hardware, they want to, you know, take things that have dual use applications and apply them to some of the government missions and that will help them move faster because traditionally, the government hasn't moved as quickly as the commercial sector.
18:26
And so if you can adopt things that are happening in the commercial sector into the government, now the government can move more quickly, maybe government procurement can, can follow and, and that will be turn out to be a, a more quick process in the future too.
18:40
But right now that that's actually the long pull is is payment and government procurement and contracts.
18:45
So and then just finally, with the public and private sector demand for space missions rising, you know, we're engineering and and operational teams are under pressure and the higher pressures maybe that they've experienced previously to meet market demands and those market demands are also changing maybe faster than they have been before as well, particularly in Leon GEO that we've seen.
19:09
What message would you like to give to the new space sector about decision making in the in the entire mission development process, you know, including operations execution, design development, et cetera.
19:19
Just just as a, as a wrap up, I think decision making by committee is only going to slow you down.
19:27
That's the biggest thing that, that I would say I have been in many committee committee and quotes meetings where there are 30 people in the meeting and you have a meeting to talk about a meeting to talk about the decision and you never actually get there.
19:48
And that's the biggest thing that slows companies down is, you know, not knowing who's making the decision and not knowing who needs to give them information and support them in that decision making.
20:00
That's one of the major things that I've run into.
20:03
And then additionally, like we talked about just wrapping up with smaller teams, you wanna make sure that even in a small team, you know, who is the ultimate decision maker on any type, maybe it's different for different subsystems, maybe it's different for different levels of complexity.
20:22
But you want to have that delineation written down earlier than you probably think you need it written down because it will just help people know and understand sort of their place in an organization.
20:34
And yeah, definitely don't want people to get in the habit of making a decision and then going back on it because they got information from someone else that that's the one of the major things.
20:49
Excellent.
20:50
Great.
20:50
Well, thank you, Laura.
20:51
That covers all the points that, yeah, I was, I wanted to ask you about today.
20:54
Thank you very much for, for spending time with us on the Space and Two podcast.
20:58
Yeah, absolutely.
20:59
This is great.
21:00
And if anybody wants to learn more about what we're doing at epsilon three, you can go to our website W W W dot epsilon three dot I O and we'd love to chat more and tell you all about what we're doing.
21:12
Definitely brilliant.
21:13
Thank you.
21:13
And yeah, to all our listeners out there, as Laura just mentioned, the website, we'll obviously put some links in, in the show notes and everything else.
21:20
And I think there was a wealth of information there that you can use, particularly when there are maybe new missions, beginning, new teams forming new projects and programs to go after.
21:30
But also for those companies and those organizations who they have reached a certain level of size scale, frustration, success.
21:38
And now realize that they're in a position where they need to start standardizing these things, they need to write these things down, who's in charge of what and Epson three might be the place where you find the easiest way to do this.
21:51
Thank you very much to all our listeners that they've spent the time with us today.
21:54
Thank you very much to Laura again and we'll be back soon on the Space Industry podcast.
22:01
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Space Industry by Sat Search.
22:05
I hope you enjoyed today's story about one of the companies taking us into orbit.
22:09
We'll be back soon with more in depth behind the scenes, insights from private space businesses.
22:13
In the meantime, you can go to set search dot com for more information on the space industry today or find us on social media.
22:19
If you have any questions or comments to stay up to date, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can also get each podcast on demand on itunes, Spotify, the Google Play Store or whichever podcast service you typically use.