A Day in the Life of a Principal Space Architect

Hi HN! I'm the founder of Elpha.

One of our members, Isa Peterson, is a Principal Space Architect at Tesseract Space. I noticed her job title on her Elpha profile and had no idea what her job was, but I was intrigued. So I asked if she'd write up a post telling us a more about it. As it turns out, her job is pretty interesting. Hope you enjoy!

Hi HN, I’m Erik CEO at Tesseract. Tesseract went through YC in Summer 2017 and builds in space propulsion. Please reach out if you have any questions

Fascinating!

Do you get to watch launches on-site for satellites that carry engines that you worked on? :-)

So is he an aerospace engineer or a principal space architect? His first sentence seems contradictory.

So your propulsion systems are all designed for vacuum? How does one fully validate such a system on the ground?

[edit] Also: what are the trade-offs in scaling by bundling several thrusters together vs building a bigger thruster?