Engineering Internet Access for All • Roshena MacPherson
(Guidance, Navigation, and Control Team Lead, Astranis || CA, USA)
“I joined Astranis two years ago as employee number eight. We design, build, and fly small Geostationary satellites to provide internet to the 4 billion people in the world who don’t have access to it. To meet our goals, we’ve grown to around 80 full time folks, and are still looking for more. It’s been really cool being a part of it from the very beginning, when there was literally no code for our current project. I didn’t expect that two years later I would be lead for the Guidance, Navigation, and Control team of a satellite company! My day-to-day involves mostly technical advising, risk management, and scheduling to make sure we’re on track for our launch date, plus some algorithm design and analysis when I get the time. The amount of responsibility and ownership new grads can have is huge! It’s amazing how fast you can learn in an environment like that. I remember launching our first demo satellite in Alaska and I was at home in my pajamas trying to debug my control algorithm real-time in the 14 minutes you get as it passes over the ground station. Now we’re preparing for the launch of our first commercial vehicle in about a year, which will provide internet service to the state of Alaska.
•
I’d never considered a career in aerospace until a year into my Master’s in Mechanical Engineering. I had the intention of getting a PhD and becoming a professor initially, but I stumbled into an orbital mechanics class and loved it. I later decided to take a year-long mechatronics class, where I got a chance to build hardware and see projects go from start-to-finish really quickly in a small team. That’s when I realized I was way happier doing this than research, and decided to leave the PhD program for a job in Aero/Astro.
•
Practice and asking questions can get you really, really far. I started at Astranis nervous that I didn’t have the “intuition” that other more senior engineers had. Turns out, asking for help and getting real hands-on experience is what it takes to build that intuition. Commit to getting better at something, and ask tons of questions along the way!”
