Senior Mission Operations Engineer

Astroscale UK is looking for an experienced Senior Mission Operations Engineer to join our team in Harwell. We require an additional person to join our team to take an active role in all phases of Astroscale’s current and future missions, such as ELSA-M and COSMIC.

This position offers a great opportunity for someone who is looking to take the next step in their career, as the responsibilities cover a wide variety of tasks that would normally be split between the traditionally separated roles of Spacecraft Operations Engineers, Spacecraft Controllers, Analysts, Mission Manager, Operations Preparation Engineers and System Engineers. The successful candidate will be expected to perform at a high level across a broad range of activities and mission phases.

We are looking for a candidate with a significant wealth of knowledge and experience in all aspects of both operations preparation activities and mission operations. Work may include involvement in multiple missions, from the operations aspects of feasibility studies; contribution to Space Situational Awareness projects with academic, industrial, government agency and defence ministry partners; mission development from phase 0/A through rehearsals, LEOP and mission execution, to end of life operations; and ongoing development of mission control facilities and processes.

There is a lot of potential for the right person to make a lasting impact on how Astroscale employs novel operations concepts and technologies to operate a growing fleet of missions within a small and focussed team. Initiative, innovation and the ability to rapidly see ideas through from conception to implementation are essential. An understanding of industry standards, best practice and requirements engineering will be advantageous.

The candidate will be expected to contribute to multiple projects simultaneously, taking a pro-active approach to their time and task management.

This is predominantly a 9-to-5 role with a hybrid office- and home-based working pattern. However, there will be periods when longer days are required, as well as needing to be on-site in the MCC for consecutive days or weeks, such as when we are executing a critical mission phase.

Responsibilities

• Act as an operations technical lead for missions and projects.
• Provide guidance and mentoring to less experienced team members via collaborative involvement in ongoing projects and missions.
• Perform routine and critical real-time spacecraft operations.
• Identify, define and potentially develop operational tools for efficient and safe operations.
• Act as Mission Manager, Spacecraft Operations Engineer (SOE), Mission Planning, and Spacecraft Controller (SpaCon) as required during operations for all mission phases. To ensure robustness and redundancy in our small operations team, all members are expected to rotate roles continually.
• Develop and participate in operations support functions, e.g. planning and scheduling processes, on-call rota, coordination with spacecraft engineering, flight dynamics and ground systems teams, ground station providers, etc.
• Develop, validate and maintain and execute mission operations procedures, system validation tests, and operations software tools and scripts.
• Prepare spacecraft user manuals, mission operations plans, and other documentation.
• Provide operations expertise at system, subsystem and unit level, supporting ongoing mission development, bid proposals and other activities as required.
• Help to prepare and deliver mission operations training and SATSIM rehearsal campaigns.
• Contribute to the development of mission operations concepts, identifying functional needs across space and ground segments to fulfil the mission design.
• Contribute to Operations Preparation Team activities, including operability requirements processes, operations concept development, FDIR and flight software functionality analysis and implementation.
• Contribute to mission review cycles (PDR, CDR, ORR, etc), reliably predicting and addressing operational concerns during the mission development process.
• Propose and develop operational solutions to enable a small team of operations engineers to control multiple in-flight spacecraft with minimal workload overhead. The ability to envisage novel operational approaches will be required.
• Perform health and performance trend analysis at system, sub-system and unit level.
• Investigate spacecraft anomalies and participate in anomaly resolution process.