During your time at EUTELSAT, you played a  key role in managing the operation execution services for the satellite fleet, overseeing its expansion from 5 to 19 satellites. What were the most significant challenges you faced, and how did you ensure effective cost control during this period? Your expertise includes operational management, fleet operations, and low-cost solutions. How do you balance the need for efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the operation of satellite fleets, especially during periods of expansion?

Initially I was asked to join EUTELSAT on a six-month contract to introduce the operational staff to their new satellite bus. Up until then they had operated 5 satellites with the same bus but now the fleet was rapidly expanding with more satellites and buses. Sometimes there were four satellite launches a year on the schedule. At the same time, the operational team was extremely small and this meant that everyone had to do multiple jobs. I was providing on-call support for different satellites, procuring simulators from different manufacturers and working on procedure automation systems… all at the same time as providing training. It was like being caught up in a whirlwind and a great period in my life. Then two things happened; firstly we experienced too many operational mistakes and at the same time, the company transitioned from being an intergovernmental agency into a commercial company. Imagine privatizing ESA and you can imagine what a change that was! During the resulting re-organisation, I was asked to move into a management position where I had to consider the cost of the operations as well as the technical aspects. We continued to expand and replenish the fleet, re-orbiting old satellites and launching new ones, all without increasing the  manpower in my area. I discovered that you cannot ask people to do more without empowering them at the same time. Sometimes you also have to change their tools. I remember a particularly pleasurable six weeks when I asked my deputy to cover me while I coded a new mission planning system – based on my EURECA experience – and we used it for many years.

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As the author of the operational training course “The ladybird guide to spacecraft operations,” what motivated you to develop this course, and what key principles does it emphasize for individuals entering the field of spacecraft operations?

The Ladybird guides originate from when I was training at EUTELSAT. As the fleet expanded, everyone had to take responsibility for satellites with different bus types. This does not come naturally and after trying out different training approaches, I hit on something that worked. The trick was to explain the common problem that each spacecraft subsystem is trying to solve and only then talk about the different solutions. Now when I was growing up in the UK, there were a series of children’s books called “The Ladybird Guide to….”. I loved them because they explained complicated things like computers or cars without using technical jargon. I decided to adopt this style for my training and so the first Ladybird Guides were issued in 1998. They were updated each time we integrated a new bus into the fleet and became our standard operational training material.  When I returned to ESOC in 2007, I realized that in an organization like ESA it is possible to spend your complete career without once being exposed to operations. So, I decided to rewrite the Ladybird Guides for the ESA context and started offering lectures at lunchtimes. Slowly, and by word of mouth, it started to attract an audience, until finally 70+ people were cramming into the lecture hall. At this point my boss asked me to “make it official” and now I run the course annually for the ESA Academy, ESA internal training and several universities.

 As the co-initiator and project manager of the OPS-SAT project, ESA’s first cubesat, what were the main goals and challenges of this project? How has OPS-SAT contributed to advancements in nano-satellite operations?

As with many other things, OPS-SAT has its roots in my training activities. Back in 2008, I was asked by the ESA Education Office to report on the SwissCube-1 project which was being built by EPFL in Lausanne. On my return I told them that they should stop all other projects and only invest in cubesat projects – I was that impressed! A few years later, I realised that cubesats were not only great educational tools but they could be very useful in the space operations domain. There is a quote from the famous NASA Flight Director, Gene Kranz, who said, “Failure is not an option”. Well, I believe to develop and learn rapidly you need to do experiments and the nature of an experiment is that failure must be an option. So, what if we had our own low-cost satellite which was designed specifically so that we could perform experiments in space that are not normally allowed on other missions? This was the start of the OPS-SAT mission which was launched in 2019. The idea was a hit and there are now 276 registered experiments by NASA, JAXA, CNES, DLR, the EU Commission, all the big European primes and many smaller companies and start-ups. In 2023 this little cubesat mission won an international award for “Exceptional Achievement” shared with “Ingenuity” from NASA/JPL who flew a helicopter on Mars.