And on the desk is a red button. A big red button.
Yeah, a big red button. It does exactly what you expect.
Emergency stop. Normal abort So.
Yeah. So you you hit that and it
basically shuts the engine down, stops it from from from.
Falling. I really want to hit that button
away. You can.
You can hit it now. It's not going to do anything if
you hit it now. Can I?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's quite satisfying.
Welcome to the APM podcast. APM is the chartered body for
the project profession. My name is Emma DaVita and I'm
the editor of Project APM's quarterly journal and your host
this podcast. I travelled to Westcott in
Buckinghamshire to meet the team at Namo Space who welcome
propulsion systems to the space, rocket engines and thrusters.
They're cutting edge products are used on International Space
programmes, whether they're satellites or missions to the
Moon or Mars. The business is growing rapidly
with around 100 people and 12 project professionals.
The opportunity for growth in the space industry is now clear
and present, Namos Space vice president Rob Selby confidently
told me. But Namos UK has been around in
one form or another for a very long time.
It celebrates its 80th birthday in 2026 and the Saito visit is a
former World War 2 airfield that after the war became the UK
Centre for Rocket Science for the Ministry of Defence.
When I visited the site on the drizzly July day, the grounds
were eerily quiet and sparsely dotted with old government
buildings, new offices, stacked shipping containers used for
storage and enough blown up concrete monolith blocks to give
the place a post apocalyptic flavour.
Open the door to Namo's offices, however, and you quickly soak up
a feeling of quiet energy and total dedication.
It's here I meet Rob Selby, Namo's energetic Vice President
for Space, who overseas the work done here, and I began by asking
him how he ended up working in space.
Well, not literally. I started in the aerospace
industry designing flight control systems for aircraft by
civil and military. When I started my journey as an
engineer, I was really interested in just finding
difficult roblems to solve, and that's really kind of lights my
fire. So complexity.
Yeah, so from a kid I used to take every toy I had a part and
try and make it better. Sometimes I work people.
Sometimes it works, sometimes I have bits leftover and it never
worked again. But that early learning ground
caused me to get into the position where I wanted to
understand problems very well, understand how to fix some of
the most difficult issues. And what better place to do that
in the space industry where you are solving some of the most
challenging problems both technically and dealing with the
environment of space as well is a is a substantial challenge
because you can't go and fix anything.
So it's all about getting it right on the ground first time
and doing that in the most effective way.
Do you enjoy that kind of stress?
Strangely, I do, yes. I've always been someone who's
lived in quite a high stress environment.
I'd like to create that pressure on myself to come up with
answers and to drive a team to do that.
So it's always been the same. It's just something that's that
kind of motivates me, him. Is is that so you?
It sounds so you like that sense of adrenaline and urgency in a
project, but how do you marry that with something that
inevitably is quite long term? It's a really good question.
I would say that with every product we produce, there is
incremental changes that is necessary to achieve the end
goal. So a lot of that creating that,
that pressure that to drive us to achieve the, the success is
really breaking a problem down into the smaller pieces and
driving each one of those different elements.
Something that we do here a lot in Mauk because some of our
projects are ten, 11-12 years longing in in gestation.
But you've got to break it down. You've got to, you've got to
find out the key pieces that you need to understand and resolve
today that allows you to learn the lessons to go and design
that new rocket engine that you need to design to go and meet a
mission requirement. And for me, that's a huge part
of how you do the project management approach.
Conventionally, this business has been a waterfall management
type of company, a project management company, and that
worked quite well. But we're migrating a lot more
to using more agile systems in our project management and
that's going to increase a lot of that is down to wanting to do
much more rapid development cycles.
So. Rapid testing.
Rapid testing, rapid development and this is part of where the
face of the space industry is changing.
Yes. How many more?
It's been brought around a little bit by the successor
companies such as SpaceX, which show how you can develop faster,
quicker and kind of develop faster.
Make it break it. Well, yes and no.
I think what you see is if you look at the top level in terms
of how the money is spent, a lot of the development programmes,
when they take a long time, can spend a lot of time doing
analytical, theoretical assessment to try and get to the
right answer. And in the space industry,
perfection has been key. In fact, on our door, in our
clean room, we have a sign on it that says failure in space is
not an option. The truth is you can't fail once
you're in space. But up until that point through
the development, the quicker you can learn from your mistakes and
move forward, the quicker your development cycle.
Is that the direction of travel then to have more kind of an
actual approach in your work in the projects here?
Absolutely. I think the space industry is
becoming increasingly commercial, whereas before there
was a lot of looking at the origins of the universe and that
is still very much part of the whole space brief.
The use of space data throughout the world in terms of everyone
uses satellite data throughout their everyday life.
All of the time from using your mobile phone to connecting to
the Internet, to using your GPS system in your car to get you
probably to the the offices here.
All of that is driven from access to that space data and
that infrastructure that's already been built out.
What you start to realise is in order for the connectivity of
the human race to be increased and to provide more of that
connection around the world to developing countries as well,
that need for greater amounts of that build out of the space
infrastructure is necessary. That's putting a lot of pressure
on the space industry to become able to develop faster, go to
higher volumes. So we're seeing a lot of
constellations or large quantities of satellites in the
the design for manufacture. That's applying a different
level of pressure on the development cycle, which is
causing us to want to move faster and quicker.
That means we need to do a lot more design, developed, test,
fail, learn and reiterate on that cycle again and again.
And that's something that we're trying to do a lot more inside
the nano space organisation because it really helps to give
our engineers the kind of data they need to actually make good
decisions. So moving to an agile approach
is you end up blending and what we've seen and it's working
quite well is a hybrid approach where you're using that top
level waterfall planning approach, but then you're
building in sprints and developments a short development
activities that allow you to to the next miles stay.
And a lot of what we're doing here is driving towards that.
I think one of the enabling factors to being able to be
better at doing that is making sure that infrastructure is
available to do the testing and the activities.
And you'll see as you go around on a tour of the Namo UK site,
we've invested heavily in building test facilities close
to our doorstep where we make the parts that gives us that
very rapid iteration loop. I think if we were looking at a
test facility service that was spread around Europe or the
world to go and do these developments, you would see
substantially longer lead times to get to test, to get to the
data to allow you to iterate the designs that you see.
So for us, investing in that test infrastructure is a
critical element of being able to move faster, quicker and with
more confidence that the developments that we're doing
and the product we're maturing to market are robust and
reliable. So it's sort of like a period of
change. We're also quite exciting I
guess. Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely. We've seen I joined the Namo UK
business back in 2013 and at that point we actually went
through a consolidation phase where we reduced the site down
to 18 people. 18 How big is it now?
It's currently and it's just grown to and we're almost at 100
people in the UK now. So it's been quite a substantial
growth period for us. We've seen investment in new
buildings, in new test infrastructure that's allowed us
to grow the skills or resources that we need in the business
substantially from where we were.
What's it like actually working here and being in this industry?
You're obviously very excited about the whole thing, but.
So I think the single biggest moment that gets me every time
and it's so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and like
dealing with problems and whether you're rocket
engineering or other types of engineering, you're dealing with
day-to-day problems that 'cause you focus on that and you take
yourself away from the big picture.
But every time I look at the moon, I realise that there is a
piece of hardware that this factory is built that I've been
involved with, that I've touched, that is sat on the
surface of the moon. And at that moment it starts to
bring it all home as to what I really do.
And there's not many things, not many jobs you can do where you
can go and look at kind of the moon and say, Yep, I've designed
something, I've made something or I've been involved in making
something happen and it's on the surface of the moon.
And I think that is such an inspirational moment for me as
to why I do what I do, because it's like, who gets to do that?
You. Can't get a much bigger picture
than that, can you? Yeah, there's another.
You can't see the Jupiter so easily, but we have a robotic
spacecraft powered by nano engines, which is currently
orbiting Jupiter and picking up data and sending images back.
So we get to understand what's going on in Jupiter, what the
composition of the surface is made-up of.
And it's like it's, it's just like it's, it's an amazing
experience. Explain to us about how the work
the kind of different types of projects that is kind of maybe
different divisions you have here and what technologies
you're researching and working with and then which space
missions they've ended up being used in?
Sure. So I would say our business
centres solely on propulsion for spacecraft and for space access.
And when I say space access, you're talking about the ability
to launch something into space. We typically only deal with on a
launcher kind of steering aspects of of that vehicle
versus a large, large engines that would allow you to lift the
satellite off on the surface of the Earth and take it into
space. They would have to be done in a
much different site to the one we operate because those engines
are much, much larger. And.
So our engines typically featuring the ones that are
either doing a bit of steering or moving satellites around in
space. So we've been doing that for the
last 30 years at developing new variants of liquid chemical
propulsion engines. And that's either the main
engines used to take a satellite from the point it separates from
a launch vehicle to its final orbit that is going either
around another planet or to a broader orbit around Earth.
We then have some slightly smaller engines that are used to
help with the steering and positioning of satellites and
robotic space probes in space. But alongside that, we also deal
with managing the propellants that we feed our engines with
through something called a propulsion system.
And a propulsion system is basically all the bits that you
need to connect to a rocket engine to make it go, to use it
in space. And so we developed those as
well. So we're operating at a number
of different levels, components, engines, and then we're also
doing the integration of that into full propulsion systems
that you would then put onto a satellite.
And that whole propulsion system would be what's used to enable
the mission to deliver the instruments to where they need
to be, therefore transmitting signals or collecting data from
the surface of the Earth or the surface of the Moon.
That's broadly what we cover. What projects have you got going
at the moment? So quite a few actually.
How many would you have at one time?
I guess it. So at the moment, I probably
have somewhere in the region of 65 individual projects ongoing.
So we have a real mix of regular repeat products that we deliver
to multiple customers and each one of those projects is a
contract. And then there's others where
we're developing new technologies as well.
So the whole portfolio is probably 6065 projects in total
that we're we're managing with the team we have here.
How does that split down in terms of kind of percentage?
So how much of the work at the moment is about researching new
technologies? I would say that we are probably
somewhere around about 70% is new developments, new product
developments, yes. So that creates quite a dynamic
environment because with so much development ongoing, that's a
lot of interesting points where you expect an outcome and when
you don't get it, you have to come up with a recovery plan or
a changing plan or you've learnt something new which has evolved
your development. So it does create a very
interesting environment and dynamic environment in terms of
every day is a day to solve a new problem.
Yeah, so the goal posts are continually changing because you
might have unexpected results. Yeah, absolutely.
And critically and our project team do a really good job of
managing the risk around that. And for us, when you're in that
high level of development, it's critical that you understand
where your opportunities for risks to occur are and how you
mitigate that and how you do that and keep a business
functioning under that. What space missions are you
involved with that will be happening in the next few years?
What are the really big ones that you feel really proud to
be, you know, working with? So there's quite a few different
ones that are out there. We've actually just delivered a
brand new engine which is called the Liros 4 engine to.
A. Customer called Firefly and
that's going on there Blue Ghost Lander.
So they are hoping to be the first private commercial
organisation to land on the moon successfully.
There's been a few that have tried before them and got very
close but not quite got there. How do you view the project
management function within the organisation?
Has that become more central? Has it always been there?
The fact that Narrow is now a corporate partner of APM, you
know, obviously tells me that you take it very seriously.
So I just wondered if there is any kind of development of the
project management function here?
Yeah. And I think what I saw when I
joined the organisation, it was a very engineering LED
organisation. And it naturally needs to be
because of the types of products we make.
But actually good project engineering, project management
to support and augment the skills.
The pH, DS, the, the, the competent engineers that we have
in the organisation really helps to ensure we both focus on the
technical and also how we get there in a, in an appropriate
time frame. And how we really mention that
risk, not just technical, but project risk as well.
So we've been navigating to growing our project organisation
through the last five to 10 years as part of our journey to
where we're headed. And that so that's been that's
fundamental. You talked a little bit earlier
about entrepreneurship. So one of the things that we're
starting to embed is we're we're breaking the business down into
smaller segments and we're creating almost business units
inside so we can recreate that small start up feel.
And we're going to have programme managers running those
segments of the business almost like a small, like a general
manager or a managing director. So we build that
entrepreneurialship within our programme management function.
That's interesting. It does one of two things.
It starts to give us a breeding ground for succession planning
for general managers and managing directors.
But it also provides us the ability to empower our our
business units, our small product lines to make decisions
much more rapidly. Because as you hear, a lot of my
tone is about speedies of the essence, but the right way.
Not just going fast, but doing it here with competence, with
good understanding, so we keep our risks as low as we can
possibly manage with them. So it's very much something
we're encouraging because it's naturally, as you say, whilst
you're a start up and whilst you're doing huge amounts of
development, there is a lot of that agile decision making that
you would typically see in a more entrepreneurial
environment. So you're focusing very much on
the kind of culture of the business, I guess, and that's
people, yeah. What's 1 of the What are the
challenges around people's, the people side of things when it
comes to the work you do? So I don't think we struggle to
build a team and I don't think we struggle to build people that
are passionate, enthusiastic and prepared to make it work.
What more could you ask from a project team really.
Next up is Elliot Worsley who runs Namos Reliance programme.
He explained that as the business has grown, the company
went from managing projects as a group to now managing them
within 3 product lines. The 1st is fluidic components
using the propulsion systems for satellites or lunar landings or
missions to Mars. The second line is chemical
propulsion products for thrusters that are used for
spacecraft. And the third line, which is
what he looks after, is all about propulsion systems,
including the Reliance programme.
I asked him to tell me more. I think Reliance is very
interesting. I am very biassed.
Reliance is an acronym or a backronym.
It depends how you think it was created.
It's dams for rocket engine for lunar and interplanetary Anglo
Norwegian commercial exploration.
But it's really a, I'd say a first for Europe, or at least
unique in the sense that it takes what they did on Apollo,
for example, where they had the lunar descent engine, which is
capable of throttling. So this is effectively just
varying the amount of power your engine gives you, which can be
surprisingly complex. And it allows you to, to
essentially trust that throttle as you, as you break from 10s of
thousands of kilometres an hour to to a stop.
Reliance was envisaged then to target Arcanal, which is
Europe's first lunar Lander, which is due to launch in 2031.
It's one of two potential engines being considered, but
we're hopeful. When do you find out?
In October. OK, so quite soon.
So by the end of the year, which is why we have testing going on
at the moment to try and support that.
What makes Reliance unique though, and what allows it to
land on only the Moon, the Mars, and potentially Europa or other
planetary bodies, is the fact that it houses electric pumps,
which is slightly unique for rocket engine.
So typically a rocket engine works a bit like taps on a sink.
You have big tanks, one for the fuel, one for the oxidizer, and
when they mix, they combust. But these taps essentially
adjust the flow rates of both of those to decide what you get in
your engine. Now that means the tanks are
very heavy and all the equipment upstream is very heavy because
you have to hold things at very high pressures so that when you
turn the tap on, it flows straight out reliance because it
houses these pumps, they actually take something from
very low pressure, not not significantly higher pressure
than like your water system at home, and it pumps it right up
into the right conditions for the engine.
So it means everything upstream can be lighter, simpler, easier.
So it allows you to have a simpler spacecraft, which then
allows you to carry more payload.
And it's that it's that piece that's super important within
the space industry is the cost per kilo landed.
So that can range in the real, it's in the region I should say
of one to two million U.S. dollars per kilogramme to get
something to the moon. When you talk about the actual
cost of everything per kilo landed.
So something like Reliance could save certainly for Argonaut,
this lunar land emission could save something like 100 to 200
kilogrammes of mass, which then translates to an awful lot of
money. So This is why this is really
the business case for doing it. Tell me about what is that like?
It's nerve racking and I say fracking from a project
management perspective. I'd love to manage something.
I knew once everything was designed and even partially
tested that we had good confidence.
The problem is the temperatures in those inside a rocket engine
go up to thousands of degrees so and you can't see what's
happening in there. So only test will tell you and
we have all sorts of problems over the years.
I'm not going to create details, but we often stand on the hill
across from the the test site for good reason, health and
safety. But we listen, we listen to the
countdown over the Tanoi. You hear it fire typically at
the moment, at least for something like Reliance, it will
fire for a few seconds. After some time it will start
firing for minutes and then half an hour potentially in one go.
And that, that is something I'm genuinely looking forward to
because not only for me, but you see the passion in the team.
That's, I think that's what I like is, is just seeing, seeing
everyone else's hard work and vision and passion pay off.
Because we're, we're quite fortunate.
We work in an industry where there is a lot of passion
around. You know, people aren't forced
to do the job they do. On the contrary, quite a lot of
our work goes into managing the welfare of the team to make sure
they don't. OK, because they don't want to
stop working. Sometimes, you know, people be
online late on Friday, the weekend, whatever it is, and you
just need to be mindful of that. You don't want to, you don't
want to restrict it. You don't want to give them a
slap on the wrist for doing something they genuinely want to
do. And I don't think that's our
position to do that anyway. But I think you just need to
foster it, motivate them and also help them manage that
pressure. But because someone's going to
be on the critical path and just trying to help someone through
that is important. Does he want to prevent burnout?
Really. Yeah, something we need to pay
attention to. Now Elliot has given me a
programme overview, I wanted to speak to a senior project
manager involved with a nitty gritty of project work.
So meet Lucy Stock, who until very recently worked for Namo in
that role before leaving to become a consultant.
I began by asking her what the biggest project management
lessons are that she's learnt over her career in space.
One of the, the really hard things about a project
management role is you obviously take responsibility for the
timelines and sometimes you do need to go to the customer with,
with negative news, you know, we're delayed for XYZ reasons
and and that's really hard. So one thing can we try and do,
especially with the younger project management's is to
encourage them after a particularly stressful meeting
with a customer to reach out to other peers within the business
and do kind of like a hot debrief.
Because just talking through that the bit that was tricky can
really help. Are there any other big project
management lessons you've learned over your career or
working here that you that you would pass on to like if you're
just, you know, your first project management job?
Oh yeah, sure. What would you say to yourself?
You know, make sure you. Do this, yeah.
You know, one thing which I've learnt over years of project
management, which I think is probably the key, is
understanding where to dive into the deep end, into the detail
and where you can not manage things so closely.
So with really big projects, there's different streams of
work going on that interact in different ways.
And I think it's being really sensible about the bits that
need to be micromanaged on a day by day, hourly basis.
You know, it's super critical, super complicated and really
getting into the weeds of those areas.
But you obviously can't do that everywhere.
So it's understanding, depending on the stage of the project life
cycle and the type of project and the different streams of
work within it, which bits to really get into the weeds of and
which bits you don't need to. How do you make a decision like
that? So for me, having a really
strong risk management process, so at the beginning of a
programme really delving into the high risk areas, what's
going to be the biggest issues that we're likely to see.
Obviously there's always those Black Swan events that you, it's
difficult to predict, but having a really strong risk analysis at
the beginning to try and understand where you might see
issues. And if you do see issues, what
their impacts going to be. You might have an issue in one
particular stream of work, but actually is not in the critical
path or it can be resolved easily.
Standard products, you know, it's, it's not going to be an
issue, but there might be another area that's super
critical on the timeline and it's a new development.
And so it's really looking at the project of the whole and try
and breaking it up into, into chunks and understanding which
bits you're really going to have to spend your time focusing on.
OK. And I guess that breaking up is
key at the beginning as well, putting things into clear work
streams so that you can manage that.
What makes for a good project manager and what makes for a
good project team? The culture.
And how do you go about achieving that?
I think 1 good thing about space projects, it's fully multi
discipline team, which I like. So you've got Mechanical
Engineers, you've got electrical engineers, you've got your
quality people, your product assurance people, and you've got
your super senior technicians as well that come in.
So it's a multi discipline team, people looking at different
areas and I think making sure that they all understand the
goal. I think everyone's working on
different things within the project, but there's there's
always, there's always a goal, whether that's a short term goal
to finish something within the next couple of weeks or the
longer term goal. But giving the team the
perspective of the schedule. Because quite often you check
tasks out at team members and you don't get them involved in
the bigger picture. But I think it's really
important to do it at the beginning and then at regular
stages to the project, remind people what the key milestones
are, what the key deliverables are, and ultimately what this
thing is going to end up doing. Because if people lose
perspective of any of those things, everything falls apart
really. What I know, why don't you tell
me some of the projects you're working at the moment and maybe
one that you've worked that has been completed that you feel
most proud of and O the erhas roject you're working on now,
how it's set U, how it's run, but with the roject that you've
you've done in the AST that you feel roud of justice.
What works about that? What were the challenges?
What are the risks you face and how you went about overcoming
those? Yeah, sure.
It'd be really nice to get real insight into what it's like to
work on projects like these. So my the project I'm most proud
of, which is the one you're going to go and see later, is
the National Space Propulsion Test Facility upon RJ site,
which was a slightly different project for me because it was
more of a more of a facility based project.
And it was the first thing I did when I came to Namo.
It was basically building a vacuum test facility for rocket
engines. And there's, there's literally a
handful of places within the UK that can actually test engines
of this class. And for us that made it really
difficult because when our engines got to test stage, we
had to package up these really important expensive engines,
send them off to America with an engineer as well to be tested.
And the amount of extra organisation and risk you're
adding to a project in order having to do that and, and the
time as well. Everyone's trying to develop as
rapidly as they can now and it just, you know, months and
months doing it. So, so now we've got a facility
literally on our doorstep where we can do either medium altitude
or high altitude testing and get that feedback.
So it's really accelerated our design loop.
So working on that facility for me was really exciting because
it was an enabler. So we were all there where where
it was being built and put together lots of testing, but
that facility worked first time. And that never happens like it,
you know, it's there's, there's always something that goes
wrong. That's congratulations for that.
What, what, What made it a success?
So it was communication for sure, daily stand ups with all
the key people together to make sure everybody knew what
everybody else was doing, where there might be issues, concerns
or crossovers. So it was, yeah, a daily stand
up where all the key players were together.
Depending on the cycle. I mean, some weeks it might have
been really important for the calling people to be in that
stand up and some weeks it might have been really important for
the power people to be in there. So just depended on the stage of
the project. But yeah, clear daily stand up
so everyone knew who was doing what.
Yeah. And just by using that tone
standups do you what kind of approach do you take to roject
management here? Is it agile?
Is it, you know, more traditional methods?
Is it everything whatever works from the toolbox?
Yeah. So a really interesting question
because we space traditionally leans quite heavily towards a
waterfall standard approach, but what we are trying to do is
implement pockets of agile to accelerate things.
So. That's interesting.
How? How's that working?
Yeah. How do you do it?
Yeah. So it's, it's, I think we'll
never get fully agile because we're building big mechanical
systems, but we can do a hybrid where we look.
So say for example, with the facility, we look at individual
areas of the site. So say for example the thrust
stand which the engine is mounted on.
So when it fires you can you can measure what the thrust is,
which wasn't one of the key measurements we take when we're
testing the engines. You could look at that as a
complete sub assembly and say OK we can't finish the whole system
until the end, but we can take each sub assembly as far as we
can and test it and de risk it as much as we can before the
final point. OK.
So where do you think generally it's heading towards the kind of
SpaceX model? I think it's somewhere in
between new space and old space. Middle space.
Middle space.
That sounds exciting. Yeah, I think, I think, I think
the extreme of new space and the maybe lack of attention to
detail in some areas and then the reverse in the old space
management style. I think they'll they'll
hopefully be a happy medium in the middle where we can be a bit
more rapid but not miss things. The most cutting edge test
facility that Lucy successfully delivered is a short walk away
from its offices. I went to take a look around
accompanied by Carl Smith, a senior test engineer, who
explained some of what goes on there.
So I managed the National Space Fortune facility.
So it's my job to make sure that that keeps running safely and
efficiently. Yeah.
And how often are you using facilities here?
Every day. We are, we're, we're not hot
fire testing every day, but we're, we're, we're always doing
sort of engine prep, site prep set down and, and we're firing
sort of every two or three weeks really.
What's the hot fire test? So hot fire test is where we,
we, we fire the engine. So we provide propellants into
the engine. I'll explain a little bit more
about that. Yeah.
So what? What are we approaching here?
So this is Nanos J3 test cell. OK.
So it just looks like a big concrete bunker with a lot of
stuff coming out of it. Yes, yes, I'll explain that a
little bit now. So, yeah, so J3 test cell, which
is, which is the cell here was built about a decade ago.
It was initially built to support the development of our
1100 Newton HTE engine. So that uses this.
This site uses monomethyl hydrogen or hydrogen as a fuel
and it uses Mon 3 as the oxidizer and this was originally
a sea level test facility. What does that mean?
Sea level. So that means that you hot fire
test out into the open air basically at ambient pressures.
And that's absolutely great for the majority of engine
development, but it'll only get you so far.
To fully qualify an engine for flight, you have to test in a
vacuum. OK.
And, and also every engine that we sell goes through acceptance
testing as well. And again, you have to test in a
vacuum to do that. And that's where the National
Space Portion Test facility comes in.
So what you see coming out of the building here, that's part
of the National Space Portion Test facility, that's actually
owned by the UK Space Agency. What is it?
Can you describe it? Yes, I can describe it.
So it it's a little bit complicated.
I think I'll if I come on to that it.
Looks like a tunnel to me, yeah. Yeah, it it, it sort of is.
But yeah, if I I'll explain that OK once I've explained the
engine. So I think it'll make a little
bit more sense. To you OK, Yeah.
So it's owned by the UK Space Agency.
But, but, but we operate it at Namo and it effectively converts
J3 from a sea level test facility to A to a vacuum
facility. And that's, that's really great
for us because we used to have to send all of our engines to
the US to test, but now we've brought that capability in House
of Westcott. Most acceptance testing that we
do on engines will normally be a day or two.
OK, Yeah. So when was the last time you
did one? Last week.
We've got another plan next week.
Yeah. Oh.
I came on the wrong week. It's always the way.
So are you standing far away to observe these experiments?
We we watch from the control room.
We can go and take a look in there now if you'd like.
Yeah, I'd like to have a look at the control room.
Thank you. Close this up.
There. So anyone who wants to test
anything along the lines that you're doing has to come here to
test it. There's not many places in the
world that do what we do, really.
There's obviously many places in America and also in Germany, but
you know, This site is, is is one-of-a-kind, and it's very
efficient at what it does. Yeah.
So this is the control room. So this gives you an idea of
what the the the team will see when they're firing an engine.
Yeah. So what's so in thought is being
tested. The team will be in here.
Yes, absolutely. Yes, this is the control room.
So we run the site with two operators generally.
We will quite often have a a support engineer here as well
with us. So what you're looking at here
is the site controller and data acquisition software that allows
us to operate the various systems.
There's like 10 screens here. Yes, there's there's a lot to
look at, but there's a lot of autonomy to it as well.
And that's why we can run the site with just two, two
operators. So the first screen over here,
for example, is the software for the national space portion test
facility. So that allows us to control the
vacuum pumps in the cooling system.
And it's actually continually monitoring instrumentation
around the whole system. So there's instrumentation on
the diffuser, the plume intercooler, the vacuum
generation plant, the cooling system constantly monitoring the
health of the system. And if any parameters start
falling out of predefined limits, and initially it will
flag up a warning. So you know, there's there's
something wrong here. If parameters continue to fall
out of predefined limits, it will automatically abort the
firing, shut down the system, and put it into a safe state.
So that autonomy allows the the test team to focus on the engine
they're testing and almost, you know, ignore all of those
systems that are just running in the background.
OK. So what we've also got is the
site control for the propellant feed system that allows us to
operate various valves remotely around the system, also allows
us to set and regulate tank pressures.
We've got some auxiliary control software that allows us to
control things like propellant in that temperatures, complete
load cell calibrations. We've got 2 thermal imaging
cameras that you see a screenshot up on top here, which
is what we see during the firing, an optical camera across
there. Oh, so you?
Can actually see the engines. You can actually see the engine
firing yet, so you can see it glowing.
That's pretty cool. And then we've got our data
acquisition system here, which is obviously logging all of the
different instrumentation around the system.
And we've got what we call up here our our real time engine
monitoring software. And that that's great because it
shows us sort of at a glance if we're in spec on key parameters.
Are you safe in here? Like if something goes wrong in
there. These are, I mean, it's like in
a bunker here. These are designed.
Yeah, yeah. This, this building was actually
designed with like with like a a rating.
I don't know what you call it, a explosion rating?
Really. So you're pretty safe in.
Here, so you're fairly safe. And on the desk is a red button,
a big. Red button, yeah.
A big red button. It does exactly what you expect.
Emergency stop. Normal abort So.
Yeah. So you hit that and it basically
shuts the engine down, stops it from from from falling.
Have you hit that recently? We do actually have to hit that
quite often, but it's not normally in an emergency.
It's normally, particularly if you're doing R&D research stuff,
you might get an engines getting a little bit hot maybe or it
might go unstable and you just hit that really just to protect
the hardware. I really want to hit that button
away. You can hit it now.
It's not going to do anything if you hit it now.
Can I? Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, that was quite satisfying. Carl covered the rest of the
facility with me after giving me a flavour of his work on the
test site. Everyone I've spoken to seemed
excited by the changes that the commercialisation of the space
industry is bringing about. This move to a more agile way of
running space projects is something Carolina Zetorska, a
recently qualified project manager at Namo, has thought a
lot about since switching career from a career in engineering.
She views the disruption space startups are bringing about as a
positive thing. But first, let's listen to what
she has to say about her career change and the projects she
works on. So I'm one of the project
managers at Namo within the chemical propulsion stream of
products. And my roles and
responsibilities are basically I managed projects all the way
from like the conceptual at the stage, which starts with like
proposals and bids is where we bid to, you know, win a contract
with a new customer and then all the way through project kick off
procurement, manufacture, testing and then finally
delivery of that project to their customers do.
You have a favourite bit. No, I love all of it actually.
So that's one of the reasons. So I'm sure we'll get to it
eventually, but the reason why I like project management is
because it's so varied. So what are you working on right
now? Which projects are you working
on? So I'm responsible for our Leros
range of engines. So either the bigger apogee
engines which are traditionally used for raising the apogee of
of an orbit, so. What does that mean for people
who don't know? So that's basically making sure
that you're in the right orbit around Earth, for example.
So the apogee point is, if you think of an orbit as an eclipse,
it as an ellipse, sorry, it's the closest point to Earth
because it's not a circular orbit goes like this.
So it's the closest point to to Earth.
So the apogee engines will raise that that they will.
They will increase the distance of the apogee point to Earth and
then the smaller engines. Why do you why do you need to do
that? It depends on what your mission
is doing. So obviously the purpose of the
spacecraft as a whole mission will dictate where in space the
spacecraft needs to be. So it's like the positioning of
the spacecraft around whichever object, whichever planet, that's
the circling around. Are there some up in space right
now or going to be launched soon?
So not the ones that I have delivered because I've only been
here just under 2 years and unfortunately this space in this
tree doesn't move that fast. So when will they?
Do you have an idea of when they will actually be going?
In space it always changes, so I think the last it depends on
which projects. So the one I'm thinking of now
is mass sample return project that we delivered engines for to
Airbus Defence in Space and Stevenage.
So they are putting together a mission for NASA slash ESA
project and the aim of that mission is to retrieve a sample
from Mars and then bring him back to Earth for sort of like
high tech analysis in in Earth laboratories.
So that one was scheduled to launch around 2027.
How do you feel about the future of space in the UKI?
Think recently we've had a few more, I would say disruptive
companies and concepts where the space industry in Europe is
based on heritage and is based on things you know are going to
work. And I guess the time aspect of
that means that projects do take longer.
But recently we've had what I call new space companies pop up
where they don't want the heritage because obviously the
time and cost comes with that. They want new and quick and
different solutions to get them into space and get them flying
cheaper and faster. And I think that will be
disruptive because in a good way, because suppliers will have
to learn how to deliver to tighter schedules and smaller
budgets. But also customers that are
competing against each other will be competing in two
different worlds. So if you're in a world of
heritage versus new space, you're going to have to somehow
bridge that gap. What are the biggest challenges
you face running a project here? I think the biggest lessons
learnt for me, yeah, would be that it's quite often I don't
know if it's just my style or if project management managers do
it across the board, but I try and patch things up to make sure
we can continue with the project.
So if something goes wrong and is, you know, maybe doesn't fall
into my remit, but I can make a call for someone to fix it.
I will take on the responsibility of whatever needs
needs doing that day to make sure we can progress with the
project, which I I called a warrior mode.
So you're, you're like, it's not your job to fix it, but you'll
do anything in your power to make sure it gets fixed quickly
and reliably. And anything like that that
comes up you're just going to deal with.
But it's not sustainable, especially when you manage quite
a few projects at the same time. There's warrior mode or like
patching things up. We'll work in the short term,
but the most important thing is to have lessons learnt, sessions
and reflect and give yourself time to think.
How do I prevent it from happening again?
Rather than, you know, be a hero for the moment, fix something,
and then move on to the next thing.
Thanks again to Carolina, Carl, Lucy, Elliot and Rob for joining
us and to you for listening to the APM Podcast.
I really enjoy going on site to meet just a handful of people
who are putting the UK on the International Space map.
Not only to understand the projects they're working on and
the important lessons they've learnt along the way, but also
what it feels like to be working in a sector that is undergoing
such disruption and change. If you'd like to find out more
about NAMO, then look out for the Autumn 2024 issue project
where I take a deep dive into the business.
Don't forget to look out for more episodes or to rate and
review us wherever you get your podcasts.
We'd welcome you to get in touch with your comments, feedback and
suggestions by emailing us at APM Podcast at
thinkpublishing.co.uk. This podcast has been brought to
you by APM, the childhood body for the project profession.
For more information on APM, visit apm.org.uk.