April 2022 Space Person of the Month, Paige Northway, UW HuskySat

Congratulations to Paige Northwa y , co-founder?HuskySatLab , as the April 2022 Space Person of the Month! (Photo Above left to right, Chris Sembroski, Inpspiration 4 Astronaut , Paige Northway, First Mode , Craig Baerwaldt, SIGMA DESIGN .)

• Currently Systems Engineer at First Mode
• Click here for May 2022 Nomin ations
• Video Interview with Paige Northway (also embedded at the end of this post).

What is Space Person of the Month?

It’s our Space Industry version of Geek of the Week , hat tip to Geekwire for the inspiration

The 3 Goals of Space Person of the Month are:

• Profile and expose the unique and diverse jobs within the local space industry, a few examples include; Researchers developing extra-terrestrial soil simulants, electric propulsion engineers, additive manufacturing specialists, just to name a few.
• Provide networking for up and comers, or those trying to break into the space industry, or just the ‘Space Curious’. How did you get your start? Who were your mentors? What helped you in your journey?
• Fun! There is so much excitement in the industry and a lot of CRAZY topics. We’ll try to tease out the true personality of each recipient and their passion for space, during the monthly recipient interview and recap.

The Hardware: The recipient each month is forever immortalized with their own personal LEGO Minifigurine! Space Nerds would not have it any other way, nuff said.?

Is there a moment in your childhood defined your passion for space?

I’ve always had an interest in Space, and looking back, there are several events in my childhood that exemplify that. In first grade we did a project on the solar system. My planet was Saturn, and I can still sing some of songs we learned for the presentation we put on. Later in elementary school I had an Estes rocket, and my father would take me to the high school fields to launch it. In high school, I would go up to the roof to count shooting stars. Growing up in central Minnesota, the Milky Way was on full display.

It wasn’t until an internship in college that I realized I might have a passion for space. I was working on a research project motivated by observation made by the Cassini spacecraft of the interaction between solar wind and the coma of a comet. I had a bit of an epiphany then that if the whole project was based off one set of observations, there must be so much more to learn about space.

Where should humans go next in space: Moon, Mars or to Infinity and Beyond?

I am team Moon. I have been since my undergraduate research exposed me to the lunar science world. The moon is an awesome thing to study, and we can test our space travel systems while we continue to figure out how to better deal with the radiation issue.

Chemical, Electric or Nuclear Propulsion?

Electric propulsion is near and dear to my heart. In the Smallsat world, which is where I have experience, EP is becoming smaller, more versatile, and more varied. EP won’t get you to space, but I think it is currently the most fun and the most dynamic.

Space is hard! What’s been the hardest challenge you’ve faced in the space industry?

As a relatively niche field growing into an industry, there are not a lot of standards for CubeSat parts. One problem we ran into was getting the parts that we did buy to properly work together. Also licensing. Licensing is tough when you don’t know the ropes. I had a lot of help, and it was still tough.

?Did you have a key mentor who helped your career in the space industry?

While my career thus far has been mainly in space academia as opposed to space industry, my advisor, Robert Winglee, has been a major influence in encouraging me to propose and test awesomely crazy things. At one point, I cut up a rock one of my earth-science colleagues handed me and turned it into fuel for plasma propulsion system. While I was doing research in undergrad, I was fortunate enough to meet and be inspired by Nicole Duncan and Addy Dove, who are both awesome women with an unabashed love of “sexy” sensors and space science. Erika Wagner , who I know from the Museum of Flight Space Committee, has also always impressed me with her dedication, her optimism and her understanding that there is more than "just work." She does a good job of balancing family and doing a lot of good things outside of work that I really admire.

Corporations have a tough time having their hardware ready on a specific date for launch. What was the biggest challenge keeping a group of students on track?

I think the challenge with any student group is that they are students first and team members second. You have to be sensitive of that when setting schedules, and that includes midterms, breaks, and students graduating. As to keeping students on track, forcing things into a schedule was very important, because otherwise we would have just continued engineering and never delivered.

What was the biggest setback you had with HuskySat?

HuskySat went through a major de-scope relatively late in the game. The deployment of the solar panels and the reaction wheel operation failed in environmental testing. Given time and budget constraints, we made the tough decision to cut both. We then worked through how to restructure the mission plan to get the most out of the systems we still had. It was definitely a blow to team morale, but everyone worked through it to deliver a space-worthy CubeSat.

What skill or knowledge was most important to your project, that you did not learn in school?

One important aspect of the CubeSat project was the hands-on experience that so many students gained while contributing to the project. Working on a project that has no “right-answer” and then having to implement the answer you chose as part of a larger system… that is really important experience that is hard to gain in school.

Star Wars, Star Trek or other favorite space personality?

I’ve always been more into books than personalities, and I think Ender’s Game takes the cake there. A friend recently lent me Three Body Problem, which has been an interesting read so far.

April 2022 | Space Person of the Month Interview with Paige Northway