What does your current role involve?

I am one of the four Chief Engineers within the Business Development group and there are two others in the engineering team. It’s a very changeable role. I can spend my time doing anything from mentoring junior engineers to talking to customers about multi-million pound projects. It ranges from hands-on engineering to project management and working on commercial contracts. Recently, I have been heavily involved in the bid for the LISA project for ESA, which is the first time we have been awarded a contract as a payload prime, it is one of the largest contracts we've ever done.

I've also worked on other smaller projects worth hundreds of thousands of pounds rather than tens of millions. We tend to work on projects over a long period of time that tie us up for several years. For example, the LISA project will be six or seven years long, maybe longer if you factor in some potential mission support. However, we also have smaller projects that we will complete over the next couple of months to a year.

Where are your clients and projects based and how do you work with them?

We work with organisations all over the world, predominantly in Europe. Quite a lot of our funding comes through ESA and the associated primes, but we're also working with NASA and other large space agencies around the world, as well as companies doing more commercial space missions.

We work in different ways depending on where the client is based and what type of organisation they are. For example, with ESA, we have a responsibility to make sure we are helping them spend taxpayers’ money correctly and to ensure that everything they do is fair for everyone involved. We need to demonstrate that we are obeying all the relevant quality, management and engineering standards in the work that we do. There are hundreds of documents that we must understand to prove our compliance to ESA’s requirements.

On the other hand, a private company will be more focussed on the cost-benefit analysis around spending millions of pounds on satellite equipment, which represents a significant financial outlay. Private companies don't necessarily need to have the same level of verification, but they are still heavily focused on quality and longevity.

What is it like to work in the space industry?

Some people say that it is fascinating because every day is different. Others enjoy working on exciting projects that are destined to go up into space and continue developing well into the future. I agree with all of that. I also have a very privileged position as Chief Engineer at Teledyne because I talk directly to the likes of ESA and NASA about what is coming up next for them. I get to be right at the forefront of what's going on, which is great. It’s an interesting industry that has many varied levels to it that you can gain satisfaction from, which is incredibly rewarding.

What do you see happening in the future for Teledyne Space Imaging?

Since I've been working for the company, it has been expanding and constantly recruiting new people. I hope that will continue as we win more contracts and develop more exciting projects around the world. 

Additionally, I hope we will see an increased number of standards coming into play, especially in a few of our core products that are extremely versatile in what they can do. For example, the CIS125 and CIS300 family are both highly flexible devices that can do a large number of tasks, which makes them sought-after in the space market. Working to standardise these products so they can almost be bought ‘off the shelf’ by our customers is something that we’re aiming for. We’re not quite there yet, however, as many customers still require exact specifications and bespoke products with little tweaks to make them unique to their project.