Starship Engineering Intern
I slept on site for 2 weeks because the 1hr round-trip commute home was time wasted. That’s all you need to know.
One of the big things I worked on: When the Starship suborbital launch pad was originally built, a DCS seavan/trailer was brought in to quickly activate the pad. This was the central control room with the servers, power supplies, DAQs, and networking for the launch mounts, vehicles, and prop farm. However, the rapid expansion of the suborbital launch pad was making this setup harder to maintain and add on to. The central seavan ran out of channels and long haul cabling had to be run hundreds of feet. i.e. it was becoming a big mess. To fix this, I brownfield migrated all the suborbital launch pad control systems during the SN9-11 campaigns to a distributed, robust, and expandible architecture. We moved to a completely de-centralized system with smaller DAQ nodes/cabinets (with 2-4 DAQs each) spread across the launch pad and prop farm. We had to do this while maintaining launch capabilities for SN9 through SN11 prototype testing.
We migrated 392 individual devices, 692 total channels including RTDs, pressure transducers, valves, pumps, heaters, stringpots, LeLs, etc. in 64 days.
This was a multi-discipline, multi-team effort including flight control, launch engineering, fluids, DCS, automation, IT, high power, software, and more (I am very grateful for these incredible engineers).
Besides that migration effort, and in general, I activated, troubleshot, and maintained the NI based DCS systems on suborbital and orbital launch pads. I Ported Siemens’ PROFINET driver to SpaceX’s launch pad platform (C/C++) so that we could have a direct PROFINET link to the catch tower PLCs from our launch pad servers/software.
Around July, we had a major push to finish B4, S20, the orbital launch mount, catch tower, and prop farm requiring hundreds (300) employees from other locations to relocate to Boca for 3 weeks. I coordinated a 12-person DCS engineering team during this time to accelerate the DCS activations for the orbital launch pad. This was a total of 40 DCS personnel including engineers and technicians. I helped design, build, and install all the orbital DCS systems.
I am very grateful for having the opportunity to work with the incredible engineers down there. I cannot thank everyone I worked with enough for helping me learn and contribute to the effort. One of the most fulfilling 8 months of my life working at Starbase, climbing around the launch pads, and helping us get to Mars and beyond.
Unofficial Mission Patches