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October 11, 2019.

We are excited to report that NASA’s Ionospheric CONnection Explorer (ICON) mission successfully launched last night and is now in orbit. During the first pass of the Northrop Grumman L-1011 Stargazer through the launch zone, the Pegasus XL drop was aborted; they circled around and on the next lap the launch was successful. All three Pegasus rocket stages performed nominally, and the ICON satellite ultimately separated and is now circling Earth on its mission to study the frontier of space. Read NASA’s press release here.

Led by University of California Berkeley and PI Thomas Immel with support from Stellar, ICON is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and will help us learn more about the dynamic zone called the ionosphere, high in our atmosphere where terrestrial weather from below meets space weather above, or “our interface to space”.

ICON carries four instruments to collect images of the ionosphere and directly measure characteristics of the space environment. This region of space is a critical part of how we transmit and receive data, and its fluctuations can distort and disrupt those signals with catastrophic effects. Much remains to be learned about the ionosphere’s makeup, behavior, and variability due to external influences, and the ICON spacecraft will be the first to study how the space environment is connected to conditions in our atmosphere and weather.

Stellar has supported UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory in the planning and implementation of this mission during all phases. ICON is a science mission, but there is a lot of engineering going on behind the scenes to make it all happen, and that’s where Stellar Solutions comes in – providing key mission, systems, thermal, and instrument engineering expertise to our partners.

A number of Stellar personnel who have supported this mission over the years are noted below:

• Carl Yanari is currently supporting ICON as a Senior Thermal SE, as well as providing launch support and commissioning.
• Brett Stroozas (advisor) is Ops Readiness Director, preparing and running rehearsals and other readiness exercises.
• Mike DeKlotz previously served as Verification Lead and helped with ops readiness.
• Jeff Lynn (now a customer) was previously Deputy PM for one of the science instruments.
• Several other Stellar advisers served on ICON’s Internal Review Board.

A highlight of our “stellar” support is Carl Yanari who is part of Stellar’s Civil Programs team at NASA Goddard. With over 33 years of industry experience on a variety of spacecraft and instruments, he provides thermal engineering subject matter expertise for ICON, and is responsible for the overall thermal design concept, analyses, testing, implementation, and performance of the instruments and spacecraft. ICON’s unique orbit causes each side of the observatory to be illuminated by the sun at various points during the mission. This is a major challenge as the environment continually changes from hot to cold and back–but due to Carl’s exemplary support, the  thermal design will protect the hardware and ensure that the mission goals are met.

The systems and instruments Stellar has helped develop will enable scientists around the country to tackle issues affecting our way of living on Earth and in space, including human spaceflight and defense as well as the airline and telecommunications industries.

Congratulations and thanks again to Carl and our partners for a successful launch!

October 9, 2019. 

Stellar Solutions’ Vice President for Defense Programs, Betsy Pimentel, has been at the forefront of aerospace engineering, space exploration and defense throughout a career that has reached great heights in the public and private sectors.  Also notable is the fact that Pimentel got her start as part of the first U.S. Air Force Academy class of women in 1976. In 2020, as she is poised to commemorate the 40th anniversary of this first coeducational graduating class, Pimentel is commanding the interest of a generation of women and men who are eager to understand the profound roles of aerospace and technology in their future.

Pimentel has appeared on a variety of platforms, from Yahoo Finance on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, to the California Council for Excellence‘s annual Leadership Symposium on innovation and performance October 4 where she was a featured speaker.  This coincides with an important milestone in history: on October 7, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the law allowing the service academies to admit women. The first class that included women entered in 1976 and graduated in 1980. Pimentel received a Bachelor of Science from the Academy and then completed a Masters in Engineering Management form Santa Clara University with the technical portion in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science.  

“Betsy Pimentel is an outstanding leader and role model for women and men.  Her insistence on excellence and integrity in designing and completing complex missions results in projects that expand our knowledge and benefit our nation,” said Celeste Ford, Board Chair and Founder.

From her positions as Chief, Space Control Planning with the U.S. Air Force and Director of Defense Policy in the National Security Council at the White House, to advancing space system integration at Northrop Grumman, TASC Inc., and Stellar Solutions, Pimentel is a nationally-recognized leader in all aspects of space system and mission planning, systems engineering and defense program management.

After Gerald Ford signed Public Law 94-106 directing the service academies to admit women, more than 300 enrolled in the academies of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. The country soon went from divisive arguments in Congress and resistance from the Department of Defense on the prospect of allowing these women in, to the Air Force selecting the first woman aviator for Test Pilot School in 1982. Just a few years later, six Air Force women served as pilots, copilots and boom operators during military operations in Libya during 1986, the same year that the Air Force Academy saw its first female top graduate. This progression is symbolic of “forming a more perfect union” – continuing together as individuals, communities, and a nation to strive and innovate across all levels of the human condition.

The dedication and courage of these trailblazers paved the way not only in the military but across all of society. Even today, women remain extraordinarily underrepresented in the industry C-Suite particularly as the seniority increases among those top level positions. Betsy Pimentel has persevered in this area as well, as one of those few top level female executives in the male dominated areas like technology and national defense. 

She has shared knowledge and wisdom on important issues such as: 

• The evolving importance of space in the Defense and Intelligence arenas where Betsy is well known for her contributions over the years. 
• How the proliferation of communications, video and audio technologies is changing the dynamics and landscape of space exploration and how this will lead to new discoveries. 
• How the role of women has grown from the time when Stellar Solutions Founder and Board Chair Celeste Ford was one of the few women in the control center launching satellites, to today when female aerospace engineers are a vital component of the workforce. 
• How the pursuit of a return to the moon and even Mars is energizing the next generation of aerospace engineers. 
• How commercial organizations and international partnerships are joining the government in driving space exploration.

As we consider the future of civilization and humanity, including sending the first woman beyond low-Earth orbit to the Moon and possibly Mars, the stories and lessons of women like Betsy Pimentel are a key part of the incredible journey.

October 03, 2019

Celeste Ford, founder and Board Chair of Stellar Solutions has been featured in the Fall 2019 issue of Enterprising Women. The text from the article can be found below along with a download link. The print edition of Enterprising Women celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2010; the digital version of the magazine was launched in 2008 and reaches nearly a million top women entrepreneurs in 185 countries around the globe.

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Celeste Ford: The Journey of a Woman Rocket Scientist

Enterprising Women Magazine Fall 2019 | Monica Smiley, Editor

2019 has been a milestone year in space exploration—from the historic celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing to NASA’s plans to have astronauts step onto the lunar South Pole by 2024.

I began my career in 1978 as one of the very few female aerospace engineers in control centers launching satellites, and it’s been thrilling to see the frontier of opportunity for women – and men— expand dramatically over time.

I believe that people and their search for knowledge are at the heart of our future success; and this led me to found Stellar Solutions, Inc., a global systems engineering provider, almost 25 years ago.

The rapid escalation of technology advancement since then has transformed the entire industrial landscape and has enabled game-changing agility and the proliferation of new participants in space exploration, transportation, defense, intelligence  and communications.

Government agencies, commercial enterprises and entrepreneurial disruptors are competing and learning from each other as they tackle critical issues that affect us all – like weather prediction, wildfire monitoring, national defense and cyber-security. And all of this is happening with the integration of technologies on the ground and in space.

This convergence of discovery and innovation is leading to a remarkable future in which new satellites can enable us to take better care of our planet. They are also bringing the Internet to the sky so we can stay connected in a multitude of ways anywhere on Earth and even beyond.

This progress has been fueled by a diversity of talent – across genders, nationalities and career backgrounds – that unleashes the intellectual capacity, curiosity and passion needed to accomplish the impossible every day.

Companies like Stellar, with its boundless reservoir of expert engineers and visionaries, are key partners in creating this exciting future.

Starting out in Palo Alto, CA, I built this company on the proposition that our engineers and scientists could solve the most complex issues that commercial and government clients face. Our value was rooted in our talent, so they became a core part of our vision: to satisfy our customers’ critical needs while realizing our dream jobs.

This was a radical notion at a time when top-down, command-and-control hierarchy was the norm in most corporations and government agencies.

It was also a time of very few women entering the aerospace industry. I recall standing alone as a female engineer in the mission control center, acutely aware of the sound of my feminine voice over the loud speaker and the importance of delivering an impeccable job performance. I knew I needed to strive not only to advance my own career but to ensure that the doors would be open to other women who followed.

Rather than be deterred, I focused on being the best I could be, and actively sought to learn from co-workers and customers at the top of their class. After becoming a mother of three, I eventually realized that my professional destiny was to create my own company – a flexible and highly entrepreneurial workplace where talented people could thrive and contribute  outsized results.

I launched Stellar Solutions as someone already well accustomed to blazing new trails along unbeaten paths. I knew that to succeed as a “small” company in an ultra-competitive and complex field, we would need the expertise of extraordinary engineers, scientists and inventors. And we would seek to retain them for years as they deepened their experience and passed it along to the next generation through mentoring.

We did this by engaging them with exhilarating challenges, entrepreneurial freedom and professional recognition they might not find elsewhere. One example is our humanitarian effort, QuakeFinder, in which dedicated scientists are pursuing the ability to predict earthquakes in the days or weeks before they hit, ultimately saving lives.

As the company grew, I also wanted to avoid the rigid silos that stifled communications and creativity in other places. We established a company practice called “crossing the boundaries” among our civil, commercial, international, defense and intelligence programs. Our people could access experts and ideas in every aerospace sector, leading to a cross-pollination of ideas that unlocked problems that no one else could solve. Likewise, our clients could access experts across the company regardless of their industry.

This was an early model of today’s dynamic workplace that prizes access to knowledge and employee satisfaction. Not only has it proven sustainable for us as we have expanded globally, it has also created a rewarding pathway for women. I am proud that Stellar Solutions cultivates a robust pipeline of female engineers, scientists and strategists from entry level to senior management, all making significant contributions to our innovative solutions and our customers’ outcomes.

NASA’s next program to take humans back to the Moon has been named Artemis, after the sister of Apollo in Greek mythology. As we continue as a civilization to explore the possibilities for our connections and horizons on Earth and in the heavens, I am heartened to know that women and others traditionally underrepresented are playing a prominent part of this incredible journey.

CELESTE FORD is Chair and Founder of Stellar Solutions, a 2017 winner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

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More insight from Celeste Ford

Celeste Ford offers the following guidelines in seeking out and retaining highly specialized professionals. Her pursuit of an employee-focused company has resulted in 100% of its clients saying Stellar Solutions satisfied a critical need for them:

Inclusion: Your employees are your eyes and ears. Encourage them to inquire, listen and identify new critical needs and help in the strategic planning process. Tie goals to individual bonus plans and reward success. Every person has valuable insights, and everyone can have a stake in the future of the business.

Mission-Driven: In Silicon Valley, many companies are “built to flip,” a disincentive for engineers who don’t see themselves as an “asset” to be sold. Knowing that Stellar Solutions was “built to last,” team members are incentivized by the pursuit of discoveries that advance and protect the human condition: cyber-defense, technological connectivity and Earth science improvements. QuakeFinder, our humanitarian global research and development initiative, is expected to unlock the algorithm for forecasting earthquakes in a matter of years.

Knowledge-Fueled. Employees are hungry for information and wisdom. A comprehensive training program throughout their careers keeps engineers and professionals of all ages engaged and excited to discover and innovate in fast-changing industries. Also important is a commitment to lifelong learning.

Accomplish the Impossible. Keeping our professionals motivated by working in their dream jobs is a key part of retention. Millennials in particular are attracted by – and make job acceptances based upon – technological challenges. That’s why “solving the impossible” is what keeps our people excited and energized each day.

September 30, 2019. 

The First Arab to Reach Low-Earth Orbit

In my role managing this region for Stellar’s international sector, I am excited to report that giant leaps in space are being made across the Arab world.  Last week, an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Hazzaa Al-Mansoori, joined Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir on a mission to the International Space Station. After lifting off from Kazakhstan for a six-hour journey, the crew successfully docked their Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft to the station and made history.

An aspiration as vast as the cosmos itself, the pursuit of space is fundamental to the human experience – from children who gaze up at the stars to organized efforts to benefit and elevate both citizens and societies. It was with this ambition that the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) was founded in 2014, as a government administration responsible for developing, fostering and regulating a sustainable and world-class space sector for the nation.  The country’s leadership had long acknowledged the potential of exploration to propel the UAE to a higher technological and scientific echelon. As such, another agency was established in Dubai called the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) to work with UAESA toward the goal of establishing UAE as the premier space-faring nation in the Arab world and custodian of the first ever Arabic and Islamic mission to explore Mars.

Al-Mansoori, a military aviator, is one of two candidates selected for the inaugural UAE Astronaut Programme through the MBRSC. Announced in 2018, he began preparing for spaceflight at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, as part of an agreement between MBRSC and the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos to train Emirati astronauts.

This is clearly just the start of an expanded regional focus on research & development as well as exploration. In addition, UAE is the venue for the 2020 international Astronautical Congress, an annual policy and technical meeting of the world’s key space agencies – another important event for the country and the region as well as a sign that the Middle East is a player in space. With our current strategic presence in the UAE, Stellar Solutions is right in the middle of the action which is a great place to be!

A New Race for Space

Historically, space exploration has been limited to a handful of nations, but things are changing rapidly with numerous rising countries and technology advancements. As stated in the Space Ready: The Launchpad for Emerging Space Agencies report, “With the advances in technology, space is no longer the exclusive domain of powerful states with significant national budgets for their space programs. Smaller states, as well as a vast number of commercial enterprises, have become increasingly involved in the space arena and have demonstrated the immense socio-economic benefits that ensue.”

According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), there are approximately 31 national space agencies around the world, and the list is increasing. Countries in Europe (11) and Asia (6) have the vast majority of established agencies, while North America (3) consists of two of the most established world agencies (NASA and Canadian Space Agency) that are founding members of the International Space Station. The Middle East and North Africa (3), Africa (2), and South America (2) represent opportunities for new space, particularly as exploration is broadened through small satellites and ridesharing.

The initial cooperation for building the space station was signed by the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and the eleven member states of the European Space Agency or ESA (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). Humans have been aboard the space station nonstop since 2000, with 239 people from 19 countries having visited. The vast majority in terms of numbers have been from the United States (151) and Russia (47), and nearly all of the 19 countries that have visited are the original ISS partners with the exception of six: Brazil, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, South Africa, South Korea and now the UAE.

Of the more than 200 people to visit the station, only one has been from Africa, one from South America, and now one from the Middle East. This is another indicator of the challenge of achieving truly global participation as well as the ample need for established expertise in space that Stellar can provide to markets that are developing.

The Space Ready report notes that the UAE space program has “has quickly earned credence as a leading space power in its region. By focusing on development of national capabilities in space technology, the UAE agency aims to contribute towards economic diversification and the consolidation of a knowledge-based economy”, and that they are one of only nine countries worldwide planning missions to Mars. The report’s many recommendations to fledgling space agencies include multiple references to the importance of commercial partnerships to maximize both technical and economic potential. And this is a challenge we are uniquely poised to support. 

The space journey of Hazzaa Al-Mansoori is a vivid example of the momentous times we are in! As I write this, he is up there with an international crew of eight other astronauts, circling the Earth once every 90 minutes and helping usher in the future. 

About the Author: Mohamed Youssif is general manager for Middle East and North Africa for Stellar Solutions’ international business sector.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49715269

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/09/emirati-arab-reach-international-space-station-190926061419169.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/science/emirati-astronaut-uae-international-space-station.html

https://www.space.com/soyuz-ms15-space-station-expedition-61-crew-launch-success.html

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Stellar Solutions, Inc., based in the United States, Stellar Solutions Aerospace Limited, based in the United Kingdom, and Stellar Solutions Aerospace France operate seamlessly together to serve customers’ critical needs across global markets.

September 27, 2019.

We are excited to announce that Stellar is one of five winners in Phase 2 of MagQuest, a $1.2 million National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) competition to advance geomagnetic data collection for the World Magnetic Model.  The pioneering research of the QuakeFinder team is well suited to this global open innovation initiative that was launched in March to attract novel approaches that increase the efficiency, reliability, and sustainability of geomagnetic data collection.

THE STELLAR PROPOSAL

Global Acquisition of Magnetic Measurements at Altitude (GAMMA). Adding magnetometers as hosted payloads to planned satellite launches with optional integration of ground-based sensors. The combination of spaceborne and terrestrial data could increase coverage and decrease risk.

Congratulations to Dan Schneider and our QuakeFinder team!

Read our Phase 2 Press Release here: https://www.prweb.com/releases/stellar_solutions_wins_phase_2_award_in_1_2m_national_geospatial_intelligence_agency_competition/prweb16608988.htm .

Read our Phase 1 Press Release here: https://www.prweb.com/releases/stellar_solutions_quakefinder_selected_for_phase_1_of_national_geospatial_intelligence_agency_competition/prweb16398178.htm .