Episode 57: Joseph Pelfrey

When you're working on a project like this where it can be almost 15 years, a little over 15 years to go from that first presentation of here's our idea to launching, a lot of technology advances and changes in 15 years.

especially today as everything is digital and those advances happen very quickly today, right? How quickly or how often do you have to like pause and say, we've got to stop at some point and we have to just decide this is where we go, right? Like how do you deal with, from the time you started to the time that you're going to launch, computers become half the size and those sorts of changes, right?

That's a great question.

So NASA has a pretty structured process for that design lifecycle of hardware, the entire lifecycle hardware.

And so there are steps through the process where you can infuse changes or drive changes based on innovation or new discoveries and things.

But then you're right, we call it pencils down.

There's a point where you've got to go pencils down on the design and you've got to move towards building hardware And part of that is driven by the need to fully qualify what you're building and make sure it's safe, make sure it's going to meet all the mission parameters that you have.

And that takes time.

And so if you don't pencils down at some point on the design, you never can actually get into hardware build and test and do that verification.

But there are points in the process where you can run what we call a design analysis cycle.

And we ran a bunch of those cycles where you would run through the design, run through all the analysis, look at the outputs, and then find places where you needed to change the design or adjust parameters.

Those are where opportunities came in to where you can infuse some new innovation that came in.

But when you're talking about human spaceflight, there is a risk posture that you're trying to manage.

And so just because something is new and innovative doesn't necessarily mean it's safe or doesn't necessarily mean we have the reliability data on that widget to say it's reliable enough to put on a human space flight vehicle.

And so there's a balance there of driving innovation to reduce costs, to increase your mission cadence while also managing the risk posture that you need to be in.

For uncrewed systems, you can do that differently.

And you're seeing the growth of commercial space.

That's an area where they can really push the envelope in some areas where uncrewed systems, they can iterate design changes much quicker because they can take a higher risk tolerance than, say, on a crude system where it's safety.

And there

are some cases for sure where we had designs that were most people would consider old, but they're extremely reliable.

And you choose that reliability over something that may be newer, but not as well tested, not as well validated.

And all of those things are trades that go into the design process, the build process, that you're trading that risk posture of what you can do.

And infuse as much of it as you can.