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. ULA also provides the upper stage of the Space Launch System (SLS), the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), for the initial NASA Artemis missions, where future missions will use Vulcan's upper stage, Centaur V, as the new SLS upper stage.

ULA's flight dynamics and control team, internally referred to as "Control Dynamics" or "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, flight sequence design, and the verification and validation of mission requirements concerning dynamics of the launch vehicle and any spacecraft onboard the rocket.

Technical Responsibilities

The general responsibilities and skills of 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
- Frequence-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, liftoff, 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

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
Aerodynamics
Structural Dynamics

Contributions to 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 when time allows. A list of missions and projects Devin has worked on are as follows:

Projects & Tools

Various scripting to automate or improve Controls analyses and design processes.
Elimination of high-effort, low-gain processes to optimize time spent on recurring analyses.
A post-flight data processing tool, automating manual post-flight Controls tasks
An RCS hydrazine usage analysis tool to estimate the required propellant loading for Vulcan Centaur missions

Mission Design & Integration

CFT (Atlas V N22 / Starliner)
KA-01 & KA-02 (Atlas V 551)
USSF-51 (Atlas V 551)
USSF-106 (Vulcan VC4S 120k)
Artemis II (ICPS)
Various un-flown missions

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, limited rights, and other data restrictions, further details cannot be shared.