Episode 115 – The European Space Agency: Human and Robotic Exploration

Hear about human and robotic space exploration with Belgian nuclear physicist Philippe Schoonejans. He is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) team leader for the Sample Transfer Arm, one of the European contributions to the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return program. This mission will use robotic systems to return samples from the surface of Mars to Earth. ESA is composed of 28 member countries, and Philippe has cooperated extensively with NASA, Japan, Canada and Russia in his projects. He shares his complex projects and the many constraints facing international cooperation. Table of Contents 03:03 … Meet Philippe 05:03 … NASA and ESA 05:50 … Philippe’s Role at ESA 08:06 … Favorite Projects 09:36 … The European Robotic Arm 11:40 … Prototype Testing 14:30 … Current Projects 16:03 … Getting to Mars 19:43 … COVID-19 Impact 22:30 … Keeping Teams Motivated 26:28 … Collaboration with Other Agencies 28:52 … Vendor and Stakeholder Communication 34:54 … International Cooperation 38:34 … Communicating Complex Projects 40:26 … Words of Advice and Lessons Learned 44:06 … Closing PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS:  ...we cherish the international cooperation.  We think it’s needed, and we know that we cannot do everything on our own, not even in Europe with our 28 countries, we cannot do everything.  So we do want to work together with everybody else, and with that also learn from what the others are doing. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio today is Bill Yates. BILL YATES:  Wendy, we’re going to go to space today.  Let’s do it. WENDY GROUNDS:  I know.  I am so excited about today’s guest.  We get to sit down with a project manager in human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency.  And this is Philippe Schoonejans.  Philippe is in the Amsterdam area of the Netherlands.  And we’re very excited to have him with us today.  We’re particularly going to talk about the politically complex international environment that he works in with many stakeholders and many countries.  The European Space Agency I think he said has 28 member states. BILL YATES:  Yup. WENDY GROUNDS:  And they also work with other countries around the world, including NASA.  He’ll tell us a little bit more about that.  But some of the projects that Philippe has worked on, he’s been the project manager for the European Robotic Arm for the International Space Station, as well as working on a sample transfer arm.  He’s the project manager and team lead for that.  It’s for a Mars Sample Return Mission. BILL YATES:  Isn’t that fascinating?  And for our listeners, you’re going to hear a lot of abbreviations or acronyms, so ISS, ESA, International Space Station, European Space Agency, different things like that.  NASA.  But Mars, I mean, we have been trying to get to that red planet.  Since 1960 we’ve been attempting to put satellites orbiting around that planet.  And there’s been some success.  But the one thing that we’ve never done is bring anything back.  We’ve had pictures.  We’ve had digital data.  But we don’t have any actual rocks or samples.  And so this mission’s going on now. We do have, I think since 2003, the ESA has successfully put Rovers on Mars, and so they’re slowly moving across that little red planet and collecting data.  But one of the fascinating things is Philippe and his team, they’re working at bringing the rocks and the other things that they can collect back to Earth.  We haven’t done that yet. WENDY GROUNDS:  It’s easy to get overwhelmed just by the vast scope of this project and the incredible things they’re doing.  But we’re going to find that Philippe has some really good information and really practical advice for project managers, particularly those who are working in an international community.  So let’s get right on and talk to Philippe. BILL YATES:  Yeah. WENDY GROUNDS:  Philippe, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being with us today. PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS:  My pleasure entirely. Meet Philippe WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to ask you about your career path, how you got to where you are today.  Could you tell us, have you always been interested in space, and how you got to where you are today. PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS:  Well, I think I maybe was not the little kid who was always already toying around with rockets in the garden.  But I did have a board game which I liked very much.  It was called Space Race.  It was about space mining, and you had to throw a dice and get your rockets to various orbits and get it into the Moon.  And I loved it, but there was also a bit of frustration because my brother convinced me to buy this game together, and I had to empty all my savings, and then we played it, and he only played it just once, and then he got fed up with it.  And later he went into languages.  So I emptied all of my little kid savings to buy this game, and then I had to find new friends to play it with.  But maybe it’s out of that frustration that I ended up in space technology. BILL YATES:  Yeah, you had an early investment in space as a small child; you had to just commit to it. PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS:  And that was 100 percent investment, so there was in fact a very large, relatively very large investment.  But I did my studies in nuclear physics.  Some people say that the parallel is that I worked with the large particle accelerators.  So there was already some fascination for things which have a little bit of grandiose elements in there, I loved that, absolutely. But when I’d finished, I applied for a space company, it was Fokker, it was an aircraft company.  They make airplanes, but they also had a space division.  But I also, to be honest, I applied at Shell, and I applied at Siemens, and at Philips Electronics to be a chip designer.  So that I had, indeed, I had choice in the end of three or four jobs.  But I think the space fascination won, and when I was doing that for five years, our colleagues of the European Space Agency were at the time our customer.  They asked me whether I would not want come and join them.  And I absolutely loved that, and I’ve loved it ever since.  It’s such a fascinating and inspiring international environment. NASA and ESA BILL YATES:  Let me ask a follow-up question, just to help those that are in the United States or maybe in North America that are listening.  Compare NASA with the ESA. PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS:  Yeah, it’s quite different.  I think their biggest difference is that ESA has about 28 member states.  So we are representing the interest of all of these member states, not just one like in NASA.  So it’s very democratic, so very, very political.  And it’s political to the sense that each participating country wants to get back what they put in, so that also means that the bigger countries make bigger contributions.  They have a more important vote in most cases than the smaller countries, so that that is for sure a complication in ESA, but it’s also very inspirational. Philippe’s Role at ESA WENDY GROUNDS:  What is your role at ESA? PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS: So today I am a project manager in the Mars Sample Return Mission, and that’s particularly interesting, I think, for the Americans because it is a joint mission between NASA and ESA.  And it requires eight space systems to work together in concert to get Mars material back to Earth, which is something which has never been done before.  And so ESA has three contributions to this mission, and I’m the project manager of one of them.  But with that I’m also very much involved in the discussions on the overall missions and the discussions between ESA and NASA. In addition to that, I’ve been doing a lot of technology stuff in ESA.  For a long time I was the chair of the forum that decides which technologies get the budget to be developed.  And so it comes from the needs of the missions that we are planning,  to where do we have a gap in technology, what is it that we still cannot do and would be very risky, and let’s focus our research money on those.  So sometimes it’s a short-term thing; but usually it’s a long-term thing, like we are not yet good enough in rocket engine of such and such type, which maybe we need for future missions.  Let’s initiate a five- to 10-year development to get that going, and then of course that was a tricky job because there were always way more proposals than we could afford.  So that was very, very interesting. Also worked on standardization of space technology.  So we have lots of space standards that are used for all our developments, and we had to decide, okay, which direction should they evolve?  Which ones are we still missing?  How do they relate to the standards that other agencies have.  And yet it’s very important because in all the international cooperation we typically want to work according to our own standards, and the others too.  Like the Russians would work to Russian standards, and the Americans to the NASA standards, the Japanese to the Japanese standards, we to the European standards.  And we have to declare that they’re all equivalent. But also sometimes you have to convince the partnering agencies that they are actually equivalent.  Otherwise they would end up asking us can you please work to the NASA standards.  And then all of our industry has to change the way they do business.  So this is an important subject which I enjoyed very much.  But I think where my heart is, is in the operational part, like really run a project. Favorite Projects BILL YATES:  Philippe, looking back on your long career with the European Space Agency, what are some of your favorite projects, or those that you’re most proud of? PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS:  Well, I think the Moon one that I just got out of was very, very difficult because it was about defining a Moon space station that is going to fly in ‘24.