Tanager Testimonials: Insights from Malkam

Dr. Mark Keremedjiev | June 21st, 2024

Howdy! Welcome to our seventh Tanager Testimonial to highlight the diverse set of people and skills required to bring a Planet’s new hyperspectral space mission to life. Today we are sharing our interview with Malkam Goldstein, Tanager’s Senior Spacecraft Systems Engineer. Malkam has an undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering from Cal Poly, SLO and a Masters focused in Fluids and Propulsion from CU Boulder. Malkam’s previous work was in propulsion before moving to space systems. He was most recently in launch systems integration with Lockheed Martin before joining Planet.

What is your role at Planet? In this role, how do you contribute to the Tanager Mission?

I’m the Systems Lead at the spacecraft level for Tanager. Over the past few months my focus has been on the assembly, integration, and testing of the spacecraft. At the beginning of a program a System Engineer owns the budgets, like mass, power, and prop. They balance the spacecraft, which is straightforward on paper and becomes trickier as hardware needs to be designed and built. For a company like Planet, systems is constantly trading parameters to refine and improve areas. We’re not afraid to build a constellation and incorporate changes into each subsequent vehicle. The goal is always to bring down cost, speed up development, and maximize mission output.

What does a typical day for you look like on the Tanager Team?

Well, nonstop mini fires. We receive questions from various groups about whether something is good enough or not. Sometimes it’s a defect and we help determine whether it’s suitable as is or needs rework or replacement. Sometimes it’s out of family data from testing. Both raise the question of whether the team should inspect or test further, or whether the hardware meets its overall objective. I have a good understanding of the high level design, so I can filter a lot of these requests on my own to speed up work happening in the cleanroom. Other times my role is going straight to the expert and then piecing in their recommendation into a build flow we already have fully allocated.

Is this happening in-person or on slack?

A lot of the work is in-person. Interacting face-to-face helps build relationships, which is important when you’re negotiating teams’ time and resources. It’s kind of like conducting lots of Craiglists deals. Whether you’re an engineer or not, everyone wants to deliver the best possible vehicle. At the end of the day, Systems wants to balance that quality with a good-enough solution. We’re asking people to give up something that they want on the spacecraft or in the schedule to allow another team an opportunity to progress their area. Being able to tackle that in-person helps a lot.

What first got you interested in working with satellites and space missions like Tanager?

I always knew. I remember making RC planes when I was young, then making solid rocket motors as I got older. There’s a barrier to each of these, and it wasn’t until I entered grad school that I finally was in a place with the resources to work on spacecraft.

I liked the complexity and challenge of building something for a super harsh environment. Getting anything to survive launch and into orbit is very tough. But then there’s the constraints behind it. You have to do it in such a way that it’s as light as possible to save money on launch cost, fits within an envelope, operates on the power available, and still has everything necessary onboard to last for years without any human refurbishment or physical upgrade.

If done right, the reward is you help move the space industry forward. The space industry feels like it moves very slowly at times. We all want to see more people in space and interplanetary travel, and there are these occasional spurts where our industry takes a big leap. That happened with the Apollo missions, then with launch providers like SpaceX, and at Planet too with the Dove constellation providing daily imagery of the Earth. It’s tough but rewarding.

What has been your favorite aspect of working on the Tanager Mission?

The people. They’re super fun to work with, and the sprints we’re able to achieve all at once are incredible. Everyone is able to rally behind something to get it done. Completing the vibe test for us was a gigantic step for this program because it validated hours of design and manufacturing work. It was cool to collaborate across so many people and teams who were all striving to this endpoint of launch readiness, and in the space-world, proving a vehicle can survive launch is one of those awe inspiring milestones.?

Being relatively new to Planet, what was the biggest difference between how Planet appears on the outside versus reality on the inside?

As an outsider from a big aerospace company, I always thought Planet was moving fast by being risky and precarious with decisions. But after I stepped into the role I realized that the team has all the awareness and capability to meet class-A mission expectations. They weren’t naive to the highest performing designs, they were focusing their resources and decision-making on the highest areas of return. It might appear haphazard or lucky from the outside, but they’re aiming their effort at the systems that provide them the best product to move much quicker and agile than most.

Can you share a hard problem you faced working on the Tanager Team and describe how you solved it?

The coolest problem we’re facing now is how to take the lessons we learned from SuperDoves (our bread and butter) and apply that level of scale to smallsats. Essentially how to produce a larger spacecraft around 200 kg at quantity. We took X amount of time to build, integrate, and test Tanager-1. Now for the next vehicle we’re tuning that process, optimizing the areas of greatest return, and removing inefficiency processes or laborious tasks.

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