The Challenge of COVID on BEXUS

With this post, I want to share some of the challenges our team at STRATOSPOLCA has faced during COVID whilst being part of the REXUS/BEXUS Program, and specifically being in-route to launch in October of this year.

Before going into the details (both related to technical and managerial issues), I want to give you an overview on what the BEXUS program is.

The REXUS/BEXUS Program is a multi-agency program realised between the DLR (German Aerospace Center) and the SNSA (the Swedish counterpart). This program has two sides: the REXUS, which is a rocket platform, and BEXUS, a balloon platform. Both REXUS and BEXUS Swedish division of the payloads are available for European Students through the European Space Agency. Our cycle, BX 13, started in October with the first proposal of the experiment. The STRATOSPOLCA team was pre-selected and we went to ESTEC (ESA) present our proposal and were fortunate enough to be selected at the beginning of December.

The BEXUS program is composed of several phases: the Preliminary Design, Critical Design, Integration, Experiment Acceptance, Launch, and Post-Flight. These phases are accompanied by a Review at the end of each where our Documentation (Student Experiment Documentation) is presented to a committee of experts and analized.

In February we presented the Preliminary Design at Kiruna (where the Balloon will be launched) and readily started working on the continuation of the Design. However, due to COVID, our University (Coimbra) was closed on the 9th of March. This is where we have our laboratory, detector, and where we held our presencial meetings and sat down with stakeholders. With the end of the Preliminary Design we were now at Critical Design: the goal of these stage is to complete every design-related aspect of the project - everything from software design to electronics, thermal, and mechanical designs.

Technical Problems

When a project team is on a Design Phase, a lot of questions are in the air unanswered. These questions relate our requirements with the actual outcome of the experiment and their answers respond to a more broad question that is imposed: what do we need to achieve our goals and requirements?

Working with a scientific goal in mind (or any other) your team can do a preliminary design of block diagrams and start tackling the requirements with some degree of abstraction with no need to use the laboratory.

When you arrive to the critical design, the end stage of your design, and your team needs to finish off their electronic schematics, however, you arrive at a point where you cannot postpone going to the laboratory if you need, for example, to use analog filtering systems. This is more dramatic if your project requires your experiment the usage of sensors or detectors and your knowledge doesn't satisfy your projected outcome.

Solving this problem without COVID would be fairly easy: go to the lab, document, and test the designs. However, without being able to go to the lab, you require thorough simulations based on educated guesses and previous experience (we also had the foresight of having tested and documented the impulse response function of the detector before and that played well on the rest of the Critical Design phase). The team dedicated to this part of the design may feel some stress with the procedures - and mostly caused by the inexperience (expected given that this a Student Project) - but the outcome is rewarding in itself if you are successful in designing.

Team Management

This has been one of those trying times in the recent history of humanity. No one expected the impact of COVID. The psychological impact is still largely ignored or unacknowledged.

The members of your team have now to face a challenge on all fronts of their lives - family, university, projects, and friends, to give some examples. The baseline that each of us had before COVID changed dramatically.

On these times, it's not the Project Manager in you that has to come to the surface, it's the Team Leader. It's now your responsability - more than before - to make sure that the team you lead has good communication and quality standards for the project but more importantly, to manage everyone's expectations, to manage the successes and the shortcomings, and to run the ship in such a way that no one falls off board due to the psychological pressure of these times.

On these times, as well, prior emotional or interpersonal hardships will surface or may become aggravated. And communication, as before, is the natural key to solve these.

There's no place for team-building done the traditional ways. Your managerial team now faces the challenge to find new games and plays to break the ice every now and then. Milestones achieved cannot be celebrated as before, you must innovate. Do not forget to do meetings with the entire project team, it's helpful to see everyone else and to hear from everyone.

The program keeps on moving, the project keeps on moving, and the team shall not stay put.

The Result

I can't provide with a simple or a ready-to-deploy solution. I can say that all the basics of leadership and project management (such as communication, colaborator empowerment, and so on) as well as Quality Management will play a major role as before, and now will be reinforced by the extra need to communicate in a different way.

I could not be more happy or grateful for the team we have built at STRATOSPOLCA. Each and every one of our members has played an essential role on overcoming the problems faced. Each and every one of our members has stood up and stood tall against the hardships and we finished our Critical Design Review with a Pass without conditions. That was achieved not by the merit of the managerial team alone, not by the merit of the coordinators of the Work Packages alone, but by the merit of each and every single one of our members.

To every other team out there and to future teams we want to say: stay resilient. The goal of these projects is to grow. And don't take that growth for granted, fight for it.

Luck is the residue of design. - John Milton