Career

Professional Work & Development

Overview

During his time as an aerospace engineering student at Texas A&M University, Devin interned with the flight dynamics and control team at United Launch Alliance (ULA). Upon graduating with his master's degree, Devin returned to ULA to begin his professional engineering career, where he continues to work to this day.

ULA is a launch service provider based out of Centennial, Colorado who designs, assembles, and launched rockets, injecting spacecraft into a variety of orbits for government and commercial contracted customers, including NASA, USSF, NRO, and Amazon. Their primary launch vehicle is the Vulcan Centaur rocket, a replacement of the Atlas and Delta rocket families, however ULA also makes the upper stage of the Space Launch System (SLS), the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICS), for the Artemis missions, where the United States aims to put humans back on the moon.

ULA's flight dynamics and control team, known as 'Control Dynamics', or sometimes as just 'Controls', helps design and integrate the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) systems for their rockets. At a high level, the team is responsible for attitude control system algorithms, various flight software parameters, high-fidelity simulations of flight dynamics, and the verification and validation of mission requirements concerning dynamics of the launch vehicle and separating spacecraft.

Technical Responsibilities

The general work as a flight dynamics and control engineer at ULA are described as follows:

Mission Work

Design and tune the autopilot to be loaded on flight software
Perform analyses that demonstrate stability of the launch vehicle throughout all of flight
- Frequency domain analyses to demonstrate stability with adequate margins
- Time domain analyses to view dynamic responses of the launch vehicle during all flight events
Analyze all major separation events (stage separation, spacecraft separation, etc.) to ensure no re-contact occurs and that all requirements are met
Calculate the amount of reaction control system (RCS) propellant required for the upper stage of flight
Develop a placard of acceptable wind speeds and azimuths for launch day to ensure the rocket does not make contact with launch pad hardware during liftoff
Provide launch support, monitoring live flight data and perform post-flight data reviews and investigations

Development Work

Determine requirements of control systems and perform stability assessments
Asses major changes in launch vehicles to ensure that controls requirements remain acceptable
Updating and developing analysis tools and input data as needed to support launch vehicle development
Attend and hold design reviews for hardware and analysis teams to demonstrate the vehicle can meet its specifications and requirements

Software Tools

Programming languages such as MATLAB, C++, Fortran, and Perl
Version control, issue tracking, and documentation tools from the Atlassian Suite (Jira, Confluence, BitBucket)
Microsoft Office 365 Suite (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, SharePoint)
Windows and Linux Operating Systems (Windows 11, RHEL8)
Proprietary internal tools and software

Adjacent Teams

Guidance and Navigation
Trajectory and Performance
Mission Operations
Flight Software
Propulsion
Structural Dynamics

Projects & Missions

Devin's projects and assignments primarily lie in recurring mission work for government and commercial programs, however, he does get involved with development-related work from time to time when needed. A list of completed missions and projects Devin has worked on are as follows:

Projects

A post-flight data processing tool, automating and reducing time spent on recurring post-flight Controls tasks

Missions

CFT (Atlas V N22 / Starliner)
KA-01 & KA-02 (Atlas V 551)
USSF-51 (Atlas V 551)
USSF-106 (Vulcan VC4S 120k)

Devin continues to work on mission design and integration for future missions that will be launched in the coming years, as well as other projects and development tasks. Due to limitations with proprietary information, export controlled information (ITAR), and controlled unclassified information (CUI), projects and work cannot be showcased in detail.