Reflections from a Year at Unibap – Why Rocket Scientists have to Extend their Syllabus to Meet the Challenges Ahead
It has been close to a year since I left academia to try work-life outside the ivory tower. In my roles as a teacher and researcher at the university, I could observe the space industry from afar, but since I came to Unibap, I have gotten to test things for real. I am very grateful for all the trust I have been given, getting to work with everything from business strategy to marketing and product management. Below, I will try to summarize some observations and thoughts that I have had after seeing the industry both inside and out.
My year at Unibap has certainly been adventurous. It has left me with feelings of humility of the great knowledge of my new coworkers, some schizophrenia over all my new duties, and a bit of worry about finally having to figure out how a computer works. But most of all, it has left me with a feeling of excitement, since I managed to join the space industry in a very interesting moment. For the first time, the dispersed paradigms of NewSpace and OldSpace are coming into contact. If it will be a brief encounter, a violent collision or the start of a beautiful friendship remains to be seen. But if they can humbly share their strengths, it can bring the space industry into a new era. Even though many obstacles remain, I see the beginning of a path to get there, and Unibap leading the way.??
Rocket Science Provides the Essence
Space engineering has always been a privileged discipline, with the term “it’s not rocket science” elevating it above other fields. But having dipped my toe in other waters, I have learned that knowing how to calculate specific impulses or planning a delta-V budget gives you little headway outside the specifics of rocket science itself. Unfortunately, other things tend to be quite difficult too. Still, the space industry is driven and controlled by rocket scientists, for good and for bad.?
Truth be told, this was what once got me on the hook. If I had to point out one thing that led me to pursue a career in space technology, it would be seeing the “square peg in a round hole” scene from Apollo 13 for the first time. It made me realise that it was not the executives or fighter pilots that were the essence of NASA during the space race, it was the engineers that made “this fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that”, and that was something I felt I could be good at.?
The Shift from Curiosity to Necessity – the Rise of NewSpace
Engineer-driven space science has certainly managed to create true wonders. If you have ever walked up to the pyramids at Giza and seen them go from geometrically perfect to just filling the entire horizon like an infinite megalithic wall, you can do nothing but marvel at the engineering feat of building them. But on an absolute scale, Khufu and Khafre have nothing on the International Space Station.?
However, wonder-building is the privilege of societies with a surplus to spend on things like curiosity and prestige, but useless when it comes to public necessities. In the first five decades of the space era, curiosity and prestige remained sufficient drivers for the industry, but I would argue that the emergence of NewSpace at the turn of the millennium was sparked by a break from this paradigm. And this spark arced between two needs – on one hand, the public (or rather New Public Management) started to question what they really got out of all the money they spent on space. This made NASA start talking about Velcro and pens writing upside-down, and sent ESA panicking since it didn’t even have those to show. On the other hand, the public unwittingly started to become more reliant on space for integral societal functions.
These two needs have only grown, with today’s governments and agencies spending large sums on innovation funding to make space more useful, at the same time as our space-dependency continues to deepened with integral functions like communication, navigation, bank transfers and weather forecasts now being reliant on space. All this time, rocket scientists have remained in charge which raises the question: Will an engineer-driven industry manage to serve these needs?
End-User Focus and the "Good-Enough" Principle
My answer is yes, but. No one doubts the competence of the space industry to solve complex tasks, but engineers love to overcomplicate things just for the fun of it. Other industries have found ways of harnessing this creativity, but the traditional space industry has unfortunately often ended up killing it. To succeed, I think that space companies will have to add at least two new words to their syllabus: end-user-perspective and good-enough.??
To find the next Velcro, governments and agencies have spent immense efforts on space innovation, which has spawned numerous space startups, like Unibap, and attracted lots of venture capital. However, the plentiful access to money has made many of these startups lose contact with the intended users of their innovations, who eventually are expected to pay for it.? Good innovation is always based on solving a problem that customers find valuable, but the underlying problem of the space community has been having pedagogical examples to explain why the public should fund it. Unconsciously, the focus of many space startups has become such examples, rather than something that someone on the outside is willing to pay for. A high-tech application that tracks the growth of your crops from space intuitively sounds good regardless of how much an actual farmer wants to pay for it. After all, it's not rocket science, they’ll understand eventually.
In other words, if a space innovation sounds good, it is good, and hence attracts more investments. However, solving the problem of explaining why space technology is cool is not very scalable, which is what VCs ultimately expect from their investments. The echo-chamber mentality of the space industry combined with the expectation mismatch between companies and investors is a ticking bomb, and part of the rapid growth of the (New)space industry is likely a bubble. Nonetheless, with all the talent and determination of the community, I am certain that a few strong companies and ideas will emerge out of this bubble, and those will be the ones that have done the painstaking job of understanding what the customer wants.?
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When Unibap began our space efforts many years ago, “AI in space” was cool enough to attract both attention and investments without knowing what it would be used for. Now, we have matured. Our products are neither the most powerful nor the most reliable on the market, but they are built on the synthesis of numerous user requirements. Hence, they solve the problems most our customers, making them scalable and us turning a profit in a quite harsh time for the space industry.
Innovation vs. Overengineering – Striking the Right Balance
Overengineering has an inherently negative tone, since excessive complexity often comes at the cost of high expense and low quality. However, the space industry has certainly found ways of dealing with the latter. With higher quality requirements than any other industry, space technology is among the most robust and reliable products ever made. It is often stated that the need for these requirements is set by the harshness of space, but even if space certainly can be harsh, I have lately started to wonder if it’s the only explanation for the high standards. Now, I would like to add two more reasons.?
First, space requirements have not always been this high. When space technology went through a rapid innovation pace during the space race, stakeholders were much more risk tolerant. When the third Saturn V launch failed, NASA still risked putting astronauts on top of the fourth one. Instead, risk aversion began after the space race, and not since the physics of space changed. It was just as harsh as it had been in the 1960s. What had changed was the occupants of the White House, with a progressive Kennedy administration eventually being replaced by more conservative governments, with more focus on budget space than space itself. I’m guessing that NASA saw this and understood that a few failed missions would be the perfect reason to slash their budget. Somewhere there began the risk aversion that would hamper the innovation pace of the space industry for decades.???
Second, the reduced innovation pace slowly made the performance of space technology lag. From having led the development of integrated circuits in the 1960s, it had gotten hopelessly left behind consumer electronics by the 1990s. This was an obvious problem for the industry, since an end user eventually would prefer performance over quality. To protect its access to a reliable flow of government funding, the space industry cemented the incorrect perception that space is so dangerous that ordinary technology never will work there. Hence, I believe that the risk aversion of the traditional space industry partly is an entry-barrier to protect itself from competition, and that it has significant political and economic reasons, in addition to the purely physical ones.
Rethinking Space Requirements – Meeting End-User Expectations
So, what do the end users say? Of course they want their assets to survive in space, but at any cost? In 2001, Sweden launched the Odin satellite with an intended lifetime of two years. Thanks to brilliant engineering and extensive quality requirements, it is still alive more than 20 years later. Whether this is positive or negative for the end users, i.e., the scientists that use its data, can be debated, but they are stuck with results from 20-year-old instruments. A computer scientist that was handed a Pentium III computer would not be very happy, nor a GIS engineer that was handed a map. Moreover, the Swedish National Space Agency can’t argue for a replacement as long as the old satellite survives – a missed business opportunity for the Swedish space industry. In other words, both Swedish scientists and space companies might have benefited if Odin actually had been decommissioned after two years. The same argument could be made for many other missions. Cassini was intentionally crashed into Saturn after surviving 13 instead of 3 years, and the US Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity both survived more than 20 times longer than expected with little new interesting terrain to explore.?
My point here is that I doubt that current space requirements are set by either end-user expectations or space itself. But I’m not saying that they aren't needed at all. A lot of NewSpace innovation has certainly not been good-enough. What I do believe is that there should be a better level, significantly lower than the current one, that would meet both end-user expectations and faster innovation cycles. I also believe that reducing the current level will be necessary to create scalable space innovation that meets the performance requirements that our increased reliance on space is starting to impose. At the same time, I worry that finding what is good-enough will be very difficult, partly due to the complexity of the space environment, but also to the reluctance of the traditional space industry to change the status quo.
Conclusion – The Future of Space Innovation
The space industry must evolve to meet the challenges of a world that increasingly relies on space for critical functions. By embracing an end-user perspective, re-thinking what is good-enough, and finding the right balance between reliability and innovation, we can ensure that the phrase "it's not rocket science" becomes a testament to our ability not only to solve the most complex of problems but also the most pressing ones. And Unibap intends to lead the way.
Product Manager, Unibap
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