Ryan McLinko explains how to break into the space industry, contrasting fast-moving startups with traditional aerospace companies. He highlights the skills that matter: hands-on experience, self-direction, creative thinking, and understanding fundamentals down to transistors and MEMS. He recommends finding opportunities through conferences, alumni networks, and space news.
Chapters
I'm going to actually skip through these ones and jump up to how to get involved. So we've talked all about space industry and space in general, what kinds of things have been going on in the past, what kinds of things are likely to be happening in the future. And a question that some of you guys might be having is you want to be interested— you want to get involved in the space industry or something related to it. How can you, or does that even make sense? So I think the— we can jump into a little bit on the reasons that you might want to get involved. This might be true— this is certainly true of other business areas as well, but I think it's certainly true for the space industry, especially if you're working for new space companies. And a lot of this is actually foiling new space companies versus traditional space companies. It's incredibly dynamic and fast-moving. You wouldn't think that about space. Actually, you might think that about space if you're not familiar with traditional companies, but traditional companies are not. They're incredibly slow and using incredibly old technology. If you're working for, again, small companies, you have the same sorts of things. You gain a lot of responsibility. You have an opportunity for an incredible amount of impact. It's incredibly challenging, I think so, more so than a lot of different other market sectors, which to me is very interesting, and it's also incredibly intense. When you're working towards a launch campaign, then you have a deadline that is incredibly hard. It's not like launching software where you might have a little bit more flexibility, or you might have an ability to do bug fixes afterwards or something like that. Once you launch your satellite, all the hardware is obviously completely fixed. You can't go out and service it. You can't do anything like that. Yes, you can over-the-air update it. You can update your software. But a lot of it is really tied to that very specific deadline. Which makes it quite intense. Just some pictures that I tried to grab to show none of this is actually necessarily satellite-related, but you generally have— it's almost kind of controlled chaos working for any sort of small company, any sort of startup, but I think particularly true for things that are hardware, and particularly true for things that are space-related, because you have so much different hardware that you're developing at any point in time, testing all of it, figuring out what's going wrong, changing it around, and then just kind of changing what sorts of things you need to be doing, especially when working for some of these complicated environments with radiation and the temperature extremes and vibration and things like that. You sometimes are going down one path, and it's just completely not going to work. So you have to go completely switch to something different. So then what are we as an industry looking for? What sorts of things do we value? I think a lot of that comes down to— And this is just going off of— I've interviewed lots of people, and these are kind of nitpicks— or not nitpicks, but sort of things that I fail to see in a lot of people that I talk to. And when people ask me for advice on if they want to get involved with space, or even if you just want to get involved with hardware, or a lot of these I'm sure are true to just any company, period. But the sorts of things that I think are important, hands-on experience, you've done things yourself, you've built stuff yourself. You have an ability to build things. And this is certainly not limited directly to hardware. This is— or limited to engineering. This is just you have an ability to make something happen, to go from idea and execute that into creating something. It's a huge deal that not everybody is capable of doing, or at least not everybody currently with their current set of tools is capable of doing. Ability to self-direct, to go find problems, solve problems yourself. without having to be micromanaged. Ability to make trade-offs. So when you're in certain— depends on what sort of industries you're looking in, what sort of products you're looking at, the ability to just having to make hard trade-offs is not something that you necessarily always have to do. Particularly true when you have any sort of environment or any sort of industry that has so many different constraints. It's important to be able to make those hard trade-offs for Oh, well, do we have enough mass for this? Do we have— can we fit a cost budget? How about our power budget? How about ability to manufacture it or make it? Anything like that. Solid fundamentals are always incredibly important. The fact that you can just kind of hack something together is great, but knowing the fundamentals of whatever discipline you have is critical as well, because that allows you to actually go through and make the real trades. is knowing fundamentally why is something true, ability to think creatively, and then just ability to fail and try again.
So what entails solid fundamentals? So I studied electronics and telecommunications. I know that, sure, Ohm's law is the most fundamental thing you could think of. And sure, there are some principles of Shannon's time encoding for communication and other things. What entails solid fundamentals? Because yes, I'm checking all the other boxes, but I don't know what's solid fundamentals.
Yeah, so to me solid fundamentals means being able to go back to the first principles, the first derivations. So let's say that you are looking to find if this component is capable of handling radiation or not. Knowing what is the structure of that component down to the transistor level, knowing what is the structure of that and how are you using it. And kind of being able to dive as much as possible into things like Ohm's law and—
So like MEMS and how are MEMS created at the micro level, just having that knowledge, would that be a solid fundamental?
Yes, I would consider that to be a solid fundamental. Knowing that, knowing how that particular technology relates to the basic equations that you learned in first electronics classes and being able to make those sorts of trades, I would consider to be solid fundamentals. All right. How to find a company to join, particularly if you're interested in space-related stuff. Anybody at larger companies will know what the industry is, particularly if you're looking for larger companies. They'll know what that looks like. Going to conferences or just reading about conferences, going to a conference website and seeing what companies are listed, you can often find descriptions and go and search for things that way. Alumni connections that you have from anything that you've been going to, any sort of schooling that you've had, personal network, or even just looking at say space news sites, and I put a couple up here, and just seeing what's going on and what might be interesting to you, and then just kind of going down that link following chain of hey, these are things that might be interesting, let's go look at this company's website. Oh, but this actually references another one, and then that might lead to places that you would find interesting.
