Rocketing through the sky to deliver satellites to orbit.
Most of us will live our entire lives without ever traveling into orbit or outer space. Personally, I'm okay with that. The world is plenty big with lots of places to explore, but most of the conveniences of our modern lives depend on rockets and satellite technology. Launching delicate equipment from the surface of the earth into space is a complex problem and requires lots of brilliant minds.
Madelyn: I'm Madelyn from WOW STEM and recently we caught up with an amazing engineer named Karolyn Young. Karolyn Young is an aerospace engineer who works on rocket launches. Thank you so much for talking with us today. So you're an engineer who works on systems to launch things into space, right?
Ms. Young: Yes.
Madelyn: Okay. So this might sound like a silly question, but I'm wondering, what exactly are we launching into space?
Ms. Young: Well, hi, Madelyn. Thanks for having me. In general, I would say that satellites and people are launched into space to accomplish missions that need to be done at altitude, and it can't be done on the earth.
Madelyn: So when we get new satellites into space, we have to launch them into orbit with rockets, correct?
Ms. Young: Yes.
Madelyn: And what are the challenges of designing a rocket to take those things up there?
Ms. Young: There's a lot of things that come into play with rocket design first. I like to say, since I work the satellite and the rocket side of the business, that satellites are the mission, but they're a ground system without launch and launch has no mission without a satellite. So ultimately, it's a symbiotic relationship and we need respect and care on both sides of that interface.
So with that context, what do we have to do to make sure the satellite is designed right? Well, first, you have to make sure it can accommodate the satellites safely. Now, what do I mean by that? That means you have to have enough thrust or performance to lift a satellite that has different ranges. I mean, all satellites are not equal. Some could be 5,000 pounds. Some can be 40,000 pounds. So you have to size the propulsion system to accommodate the range of satellites.
You don't want to have a rocket for each satellite. You need to design your rocket large enough to fly many satellites, either together or separately. We have to be accurate with our electronics. There are a lot of challenges. We've got a lot of smart people and we hope you will be the next generation of smart people that will mitigate those risks and keep us with a robust space program.
Madelyn: You mentioned the the propulsion system. And of course, all of the systems on these rockets are very important. You describe what it has to protect the satellite. It has to make sure that it can get be propulsive enough to get it up there and all of these other functions. But how fast do rockets need to go to send things into orbit?
Ms. Young: Well, rockets are accelerating off the pad, so it's not a one speed kind of thing. When when rockets first take off, they're going hundreds of miles per hour. And as they continue their ascent into the thousands of miles per hour. I think the best way for me to answer the question is that the rocket is imparting enough energy for the satellite to stay in orbit. And so if a satellite is going to what we call low earth orbit 100 miles above the Earth, 200 miles above the earth, that satellite is traveling over 17,500 miles an hour to stay in orbit and continue to defy gravity with each rev.
Madelyn: I like that way of thinking about it, that we have to give the satellite enough energy to combat the pull of Earth's gravity.
All right. You've told us a lot about all of the things that are really important to think about when you're building and designing these rocket systems, which sounds super challenging in itself, just to come up with all of the possible scenarios that you'll have to solve the problems that you have to solve before they even come up. So the scientists who work to design and test and operate rockets, they're called aerospace engineers. Is that right?
Ms. Young: Sometimes. Sometimes they're called rocket scientists. I'm an aerospace engineer, but just to give a shout out to my colleagues, there are people who have degrees in mechanical engineering, electro electrical engineering. There's there's more to the launch, as I just mentioned, than the propulsion system. So aerospace engineers, mechanical electrical engineers, I'm kind of fond of the word rocket scientist.
Madelyn: So it takes people with all sorts of different specialties to come together and build these systems.
Ms. Young: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Madelyn: What does your day to day look like as an aerospace engineer?
Ms. Young: My day changes. I've been in this industry a long time and I've I've worked on satellite programs. I've worked on launch vehicle programs. I spent a year working ground systems. Why do I say that? I say that because there are people who from day to day are looking at the technical aspects or doing assessments of a particular capability. This phase of my career. That's what I do. I look at the the technical capability of a satellite to meet my customers needs, whether it's their launch vehicle needs or their satellite needs. I can be found giving them advice on research and development, test and evaluation, investments.
How do we further what industry is doing for our national needs? I teach a class actually twice a year on launch systems, and it's not, okay, here's this particular rocket and here's how we fly it. It's talking about all the subsystems and how they work together, the propulsion, the structures, the avionics, all of those pieces that I kind of alluded to earlier and ultimately how we do the operations after we get the satellite on orbit. So my days are different, but the overall theme is making sure that we're doing the right thing for our country.
Madelyn: So you make sure that the the satellites and the rockets are meeting all of the necessary specifications and needs of the project and also making sure that everything fits together.
Ms. Young: And to fit together means we have to plan ahead. We have to tell the satellites, here's the interface to the launch vehicle that you need to design to. We we begin with the end in mind. And on the launch vehicle side, we we talk about different sizes of payload fairing. Some are four meter in diameter, some are five meters in diameter. The larger ones can accommodate the larger satellites or maybe even two satellites at a time. So I have spent time as a mission integrator making sure that those two systems are planned for years in advance. And when they come together at the launch base for the first time that they fit.
Madelyn: We've talked a lot about how to launch things into orbit so far. But what happens when we want to remove a satellite from orbit? How do we do that?
Ms. Young: Well, for commercial satellites, the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, has a rule that says within five years after the satellites end of life, you have deorbit. Now, sometimes you can if you're in a geosynchronous orbit, which is 19,323 miles high, you would use the residual propellant in your satellite's tank using that onboard engine to raise the orbit beyond geosynchronous, what we call super sync. Main thing is it's getting it out of the way of the mission of active satellites. Or we do a controlled re entry for, say, LEO satellites, low earth orbit, 100 mile orbits to cause a controlled reentry to earth, burns up on its way in kind of thing.
Madelyn: So how much stuff is around our planet right now? If there's all of these worries about keeping pathways clear and getting them out of the way, how crowded is it?
Ms. Young: It's crowded. NORAD, North American air defense, actually keeps track of everything in space the sizable softball or larger. And that catalog is upwards of 54,000 objects right now. And more than half of that is space junk. They're not at all active satellites. So, yeah, that's a lot of stuff and it's a lot of stuff.
Madelyn: And is that a problem that things are so crowded?
Ms. Young: Well, we manage. Yes, it is a problem. Let me not downplay that. Space junk, space debris is a problem because you don't want a healthy satellite colliding with space junk then you would have just thrown out all those years of planning, all the financial investment. Some satellites cost hundreds of thousands. Others cost billions of dollars. Rockets can cost anywhere from 40, $50 million to half a billion dollars.
Madelyn: It would be a pretty bad and expensive day, something if some of the space junk were to run into a satellite.
Ms. Young: Absolutely. There are there are ways that we, during launch, protect certain assets that are already on orbit, say the space station. If in the course of the trajectory that we plan to go to to orbit takes us within a certain distance of the ISS, we can't launch during that timeframe. We have to wait. We consider that a portion of the launch window that's closed and we we look for when we can safely fly that trajectory from the earth to our mission orbit without risk of contacting ISS.
Madelyn: Yeah, that's pretty scary that there are so many things that could go wrong and you really have to look both ways before crossing the street when you're navigating satellites through all this debris. What are we doing to address this problem? Are there plans for decluttering?
Ms. Young: Well, like I said, we we do manage it. We do collision avoidance assessments in terms of decluttering. There are some commercial companies that are looking at debris removal. Keep in mind, 17, 18,000 mile an hour projectiles in orbit aren't easy to catch without damaging yourself. So I would say it's a fledgling industry right now of how to declutter space. For the most part, we just, you know, use these policies to require the customers or the companies to move their own satellites out of the mission orbit of others.
Madelyn: Well, it sounds like a lot of people are on the job and maybe you will be able to figure something out soon.
Ms. Young: I'm hoping maybe someone watching this video will grow up to figure it out. That's my plan. That's my plan. Passing it on.
Madelyn: Thanks for teaching us so far about the day to day life of an engineer, the things that you do as an aerospace engineer. I'd love to hear how you got there. How you got to where you are today.
Ms. Young: Ah, well, growing up in Detroit, I was exposed mainly to the car industry. Right? And you would have thought I would go that path as a junior in high school, I was going to be a lawyer because I talked a lot and I debated a lot. I had a lot of opinions. And maybe that served me well in my my current career. But I actually took an aptitude test in high school that matched your skill set and interests to various careers and across the board the results were engineering.
So this was 1980 on on the door of the first shuttle launch. And I was like, okay, if I'm going to be an engineer, I'm going to be the coolest. I’m gonna be an aerospace engineer. So applied to the College of Engineering at Michigan. And here we are, go blue.
Madelyn: After you graduated from University of Michigan, where did your trajectory take you? Where did you go from there?
Ms. Young: See what you did there? Trajectory for the aerospace engineer. After grad school, I was actually an orbit analyst for GPS. That's why I spoke of my love for G.P.S. So I came out of school having a whole lot of fun and I. I knew then that was probably going to be the coolest part of the job that I would ever have.
I've had some really cool other things that I did. Yeah, If I would say anything to young people, I would say that engineering is about innovation in a lot of different areas. You might write software code to tell satellites that are doing Earth's centered kinds of orbits or missions, or if they're looking out into space every day is different.
You bring your whole self a lot of your skills to to this activity and something you learned 20 years ago. You may put it on the shelf and find that 20 or 30 years later you need it. So keep learning, keep being inquisitive. I need you to I'm going to pass the baton to you real soon.
Madelyn: You mentioned already a little bit of advice for students who might be interested in a career in engineering. You've talked a lot about all of the really exciting problems and projects that engineers get to work on. Do you have any other advice for young people who are thinking about a career in engineering or following a path similar to yours?
Ms. Young: I would say the advice goes to whatever you decide is is going to be your chosen field. The first is love yourself and be gracious to yourself. You're worth it. Everything that you do is going to stem from everything positive is going to stem from being your own cheerleader, being your own support. And so love yourself and be gracious. Try again. Don't don't count yourself out.
The second thing I would say is success is equally about character as it is academics. As I spoke about the GPS early orbit operations, knowing where you are and where you're trying to get to, it's going to take energy, It's going to take effort. You're going to have to navigate your life and there's going to be some little course corrections. Everything isn't going to be okay. I'm starting here and I'm going there in a straight line. Sometimes it's making little adjustments and being brave enough to to make those adjustments.
But to your specific question on engineering, I would say engineering is a team sport and I look at it as a relay race. It's not always about me. The collaboration is where innovation is found. Very few people are working in a lab alone and coming up with any life changing and historic and valuable to the world kinds of inventions. So be willing to collaborate and ultimately be a mentor, be an ally. That's my two cents in terms of what I might leave you.
Madelyn: Thank you for that incredible and encouraging advice for us and for future engineers. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today and teach us all about what it means to be an aerospace engineer, to be a rocket scientist.
So next time I use my phone for GPS, I'm definitely going to be thinking about all the work that you did and other scientists around the world to maintain those systems and all those satellites in orbit and to get them up there in the first place. It's really amazing technology and it makes so much of modern life possible. Really amazing.
Ms. Young: Yes, it does. Well, thank you. And I appreciate you guys reaching out to me. And I wish the best to you all and the young people that might see this video.
Head Writer: Caroline Martin
Video and Sound: Madelyn Leembruggen & Caroline Martin
Interviewer: Madelyn Leembruggen
In collaboration with AstraFemina