[{"content":"Coming soon. Leading across functional boundaries, building trust, and developing the next generation.\n","permalink":"https://patrick-hambloch.de/en/about/leadership/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eComing soon. Leading across functional boundaries, building trust, and developing the next generation.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Leadership"},{"content":"Coming soon. Reflections on shipping complex systems, managing dependencies, and keeping large teams aligned.\n","permalink":"https://patrick-hambloch.de/en/about/program-management/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eComing soon. Reflections on shipping complex systems, managing dependencies, and keeping large teams aligned.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Program Management"},{"content":"Coming soon. How to see complex systems, find leverage points, and avoid unintended consequences.\n","permalink":"https://patrick-hambloch.de/en/about/systems-thinking/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eComing soon. How to see complex systems, find leverage points, and avoid unintended consequences.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Systems Thinking"},{"content":"Information pursuant to § 5 TMG (German Telemedia Act) Patrick Hambloch\nRauhutstraße 442\n41836 Hückelhoven\nGermany\nContact Email: Patrick.Hambloch@aerolios.de\nResponsible for content pursuant to § 55 Abs. 2 RStV Patrick Hambloch\n[Address as above]\nDisclaimer Liability for Content The contents of our pages have been created with the greatest care. However, we cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content. As a service provider, we are responsible for our own content on these pages in accordance with general laws pursuant to § 7 Para. 1 TMG. However, according to §§ 8 to 10 TMG, we are not obligated to monitor transmitted or stored third-party information or to investigate circumstances that indicate illegal activity.\nLiability for Links Our offer contains links to external third-party websites, over whose content we have no control. Therefore, we cannot accept any liability for this external content. The respective provider or operator of the pages is always responsible for the content of the linked pages.\nCopyright The content and works created by the site operators on these pages are subject to German copyright law. The reproduction, editing, distribution, and any kind of exploitation outside the limits of copyright require the written consent of the respective author or creator.\nLast updated: February 2026\n","permalink":"https://patrick-hambloch.de/en/impressum/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"information-pursuant-to--5-tmg-german-telemedia-act\"\u003eInformation pursuant to § 5 TMG (German Telemedia Act)\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePatrick Hambloch\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nRauhutstraße 442\u003cbr\u003e\n41836 Hückelhoven\u003cbr\u003e\nGermany\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"contact\"\u003eContact\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEmail:\u003c/strong\u003e \u003ca href=\"mailto:Patrick.Hambloch@aerolios.de\"\u003ePatrick.Hambloch@aerolios.de\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"responsible-for-content-pursuant-to--55-abs-2-rstv\"\u003eResponsible for content pursuant to § 55 Abs. 2 RStV\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePatrick Hambloch\u003cbr\u003e\n[Address as above]\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"disclaimer\"\u003eDisclaimer\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"liability-for-content\"\u003eLiability for Content\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe contents of our pages have been created with the greatest care. However, we cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the content. As a service provider, we are responsible for our own content on these pages in accordance with general laws pursuant to § 7 Para. 1 TMG. However, according to §§ 8 to 10 TMG, we are not obligated to monitor transmitted or stored third-party information or to investigate circumstances that indicate illegal activity.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Legal Notice"},{"content":"Privacy The operators of these pages take the protection of your personal data very seriously. We treat your personal data confidentially and in accordance with legal data protection regulations and this privacy policy.\n1. Responsible Party The party responsible for data processing on this website is:\nPatrick Hambloch\nPatrick.Hambloch@aerolios.de\n2. Collection and Storage of Personal Data When Visiting the Website When you access our website, information is automatically sent to the server of our website by the browser used on your device. This information is temporarily stored in a so-called log file.\nThe following information is collected without your intervention and stored until automated deletion:\nIP address of the requesting computer Date and time of access Name and URL of the retrieved file Website from which access is made (referrer URL) Browser used and, if applicable, the operating system of your computer This data is collected by our hosting provider Netlify. The legal basis for data processing is Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f GDPR (legitimate interest). Our legitimate interest follows from the purposes for data collection listed above.\nCookies This website uses no cookies and no tracking tools (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.).\n3. Hosting This website is hosted on Netlify (USA). Netlify automatically collects and stores server log files that your browser automatically transmits to us. For more information on data processing by Netlify, please refer to Netlify\u0026rsquo;s privacy policy: netlify.com/privacy\n4. Contact If you contact us by email, the data you provide (email address, name, telephone number if applicable) will be stored by us in order to answer your inquiry. Data processing is based on Art. 6 para. 1 lit. b GDPR (contract initiation) or Art. 6 para. 1 lit. f GDPR (legitimate interest).\n5. Your Rights You have the right to:\nRequest information about your data stored by us (Art. 15 GDPR) Request correction of incorrect data (Art. 16 GDPR) Request deletion of your data (Art. 17 GDPR) Request restriction of processing (Art. 18 GDPR) Object to processing (Art. 21 GDPR) Request data portability (Art. 20 GDPR) Lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR) 6. External Links This website contains links to external third-party websites. We have no influence on the privacy practices of these websites. Please inform yourself about how your data is handled on those sites.\nLast updated: February 2026\n","permalink":"https://patrick-hambloch.de/en/datenschutz/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"privacy\"\u003ePrivacy\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe operators of these pages take the protection of your personal data very seriously. We treat your personal data confidentially and in accordance with legal data protection regulations and this privacy policy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"1-responsible-party\"\u003e1. Responsible Party\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe party responsible for data processing on this website is:\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePatrick Hambloch\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"mailto:Patrick.Hambloch@aerolios.de\"\u003ePatrick.Hambloch@aerolios.de\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2 id=\"2-collection-and-storage-of-personal-data\"\u003e2. Collection and Storage of Personal Data\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003ch3 id=\"when-visiting-the-website\"\u003eWhen Visiting the Website\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen you access our website, information is automatically sent to the server of our website by the browser used on your device. This information is temporarily stored in a so-called log file.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Privacy Policy"},{"content":"SpaceTech — Letting me see the space world from different angles. Sometime in 2010, I found myself at DLR wondering what came next. YES2 had been a formative experience, building real hardware, learning real systems engineering. But it had also shown me how much I didn\u0026rsquo;t know. I was an electrical engineer who had stumbled into space through a combination of curiosity and luck, and the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be felt wide. I started looking for something that would close it deliberately.\nSpaceTech was unusual enough that it took me a while to understand what it actually was. A Master\u0026rsquo;s degree, awarded by Delft University of Technology, but delivered in five intensive two-week residential sessions scattered across Europe, not a distance-learning programme, not a traditional campus degree, but something specifically designed for mid-career space professionals who were still working full-time. The curriculum covered systems engineering, business engineering, mission analysis, earth observation, navigation, telecommunications, and something called interpersonal skills and leadership development, which I suspect I underestimated at the time.\nIt was DLR that sent me. The programme had been running since the late 1990s, awarded by Delft while it still had its home there — it would later move to Graz — and DLR had been a consistent supporter of it. In the cohort I joined, SpaceTech 13, my fellow participants came from DLR, ESA, the Italian Space Agency, Boeing, Astrium, Critical Software, ANGKASA in Malaysia, and Delft itself. Fifteen people, six nationalities, a combined century and a half of space industry experience in one room. The average career experience in the room when we started was probably around ten years.\nFive Cities, Five Sessions The format was deliberate and, in retrospect, clever. Rather than taking students out of their jobs for a year, SpaceTech brought the programme to where the industry lived. Each session was hosted by a different institution at a different location, which meant you weren\u0026rsquo;t just attending lectures in a generic classroom, you were spending two weeks at Delft, two weeks in Toulouse - visiting CNES, a split session of one week at DLR in Munich and one week at the lake of Costance, two weeks at ESA\u0026rsquo;s ESRIN in Frascati, and the final session for two weeks at ESA\u0026rsquo;s ESTEC in Noordwijk.\nThe effect of this on the programme was significant in ways that are hard to articulate without having been there. When you spend two weeks at ESRIN and the people running your earth observation module are walking you down the hall to show you actual satellite imagery processing in production, the material lands differently than it would in a lecture theatre. When you\u0026rsquo;re at ESTEC for your systems engineering module and you can look out the window at the Large Space Simulator, the sense of what systems engineering actually produces becomes concrete in a way that no textbook quite achieves. The locations weren\u0026rsquo;t incidental. They were part of the curriculum.\nThere was also something valuable about the rhythm of it. Two weeks away, fully immersed, then back to your normal job for a few months — absorbing what you\u0026rsquo;d learned in a real context while also continuing to work on the CCP remotely — then two weeks away again. I found myself constantly testing ideas from the sessions against the work I was doing at DLR, and vice versa. The programme and the job fed each other. It was overall a really tiring but very rewarding year.\nThe Cohort If the locations were one distinctive feature of SpaceTech, the people in the room were the other. Fifteen participants sounds small, and it is — deliberately so. You got to know everyone properly. More importantly, you got to work with everyone properly, because the programme\u0026rsquo;s structure meant you were constantly collaborating across every boundary you could think of: technical discipline, nationality, employer, seniority.\nSpaceTech 13 was genuinely multinational in a way that felt different from the usual conference diversity. We had Italians from ASI, a Malaysian contingent from ANGKASA, Germans from DLR, an American from Boeing, an Australian from Astrium, ESA staff from various countries, a Portuguese colleague from Critical Software, and a professor from Delft. The work we did together was real work — not contrived exercises but actual technical and business analysis where different people\u0026rsquo;s backgrounds produced genuinely different approaches.\nI had come from the hardware side, from hands-on systems engineering. Some of my colleagues had spent their careers in mission analysis, in commercial contracts, in ground segment operations. Working alongside them for nearly a year forced me to understand space projects from different angles. The business engineering module, which I had probably ranked lowest in my expectations going in, turned out to be one of the most eye-opening parts of the entire programme. Satellite missions don\u0026rsquo;t exist in a vacuum (pun intended); they need to be funded, justified, marketed, and sustained. The people at DLR and ESA who do the technical work and the people who decide which technical work gets done are not always talking to each other as clearly as they should be.\nMOBEO: Letting the World See the World At the heart of SpaceTech was the Central Case Project — a year-long exercise in which the cohort formed a virtual company, defined a mission concept, and developed it from market analysis through to technical design and business case, culminating in a full proposal pitched to a panel of senior industry figures acting as investors.\nThe challenge set for SpaceTech 13 was to find an innovative, credible business concept to deliver accurate, up-to-date, and relevant geo-information to the mobile mass market. The brief sounds deceptively simple. What it actually required was the team to work across the entire value chain of a space system: satellite design, ground segment architecture, data processing, service delivery, market analysis, pricing models, regulatory considerations, and investment strategy — simultaneously, under time pressure, with no single person having all the expertise required.\nWe called our company MOBEO. The vision we settled on — letting the world see the world — was to operate a constellation of 17 satellites, combining optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spacecraft, capable of imaging the entire land mass of the Earth at one-meter resolution within a week. Not for governments or defence agencies, but for ordinary people on mobile devices. The geo-information market in 2011 was worth around $6 billion annually, with what we estimated to be a much larger untapped commercial mass market that the existing players — imagery providers like DigitalGlobe, location services like Google Maps, platforms like the early app stores — had not yet figured out how to connect. MOBEO would bridge those worlds.\nThe technical solution we designed was serious. Twelve optical satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit at 530 km, each carrying a 75 cm telescope imaging in panchromatic and multispectral bands. Five SAR spacecraft at 510 km, X-band, 3-meter resolution, cloud-independent — because an optical-only constellation cannot guarantee weekly coverage of any point on Earth when cloud cover is factored in. Both types sharing common bus architecture to reduce cost. Ground stations at Svalbard and Fairbanks, chosen for their high-latitude access time advantage with sun-synchronous orbits. Eight hundred GPU-based servers for image processing. A Geo-Innovation Platform — essentially the App Store model applied to satellite imagery — connecting external developers and data providers to end users through micro-transactions.\nThe business case we built projected $40 billion in company value and $12 billion in annual revenue within fifteen years, based on 20% penetration of the addressable market, financed through a staged investment strategy starting with $50 million from founding partners and building through private equity to a public offering in year five. The numbers were ambitious. But the analysis behind them was rigorous — we had genuinely worked through the market sizing, the competitive landscape, the cost models, and the sensitivity analyses across multiple scenarios.\nWe presented the final proposal at ESTEC in June 2011. We also presented a condensed version at the International Astronautical Congress in Cape Town that October, which is how it entered the public record.\nWhat the CCP Actually Taught Looking back, the Central Case Project was more interesting for what it demanded of the process than for what it produced. The output was a business proposal. The input was fifteen people with strong individual technical backgrounds, working part-time, across half a dozen time zones, with competing instincts about what a good solution looked like and no prior shared language for resolving those conflicts.\nIn the early phases, this produced exactly the friction you\u0026rsquo;d expect. The engineers wanted to optimize the constellation. The business-oriented members wanted to get to market faster. The systems people kept pointing out that the ground segment was being underspecified. Everyone had a different definition of what \u0026ldquo;affordable to the mass market\u0026rdquo; meant. The sessions in Toulouse and Munich were technically rich but also genuinely tense at times — the kind of tension that comes from a group of competent people who don\u0026rsquo;t yet share enough context to disagree efficiently.\nBy the final session in Noordwijk, something had shifted. The friction was still there, but it had become productive. We had developed enough shared language, enough mutual trust, and enough accumulated context about each other\u0026rsquo;s instincts to move faster. The debates were still real, but the resolution was quicker. The presentation we gave to the investor panel was coherent in a way that the early drafts had not been.\nI\u0026rsquo;ve thought about that shift often since then. What changed wasn\u0026rsquo;t that we agreed more. It was that we had built the infrastructure — personal, professional, methodological — to make disagreement useful rather than costly. That\u0026rsquo;s an organizational capability, and it\u0026rsquo;s one of the things SpaceTech was quietly building through the structure of the programme, whether or not that was explicitly the stated objective.\nThe Network Fifteen people is not a large number. But fifteen people from DLR, ESA, ASI, Boeing, Astrium, Critical Software, and ANGKASA, all having spent a year working closely enough together that you know how each person thinks — that is a remarkably durable professional network.\nIn the years since, I\u0026rsquo;ve crossed paths with SpaceTech 13 alumni at conferences, on proposals, and in institutions across Europe. In the space industry, which is smaller than it looks, there is real value in having worked closely with someone before you need to rely on them professionally. You already know what they consider carefully and what they tend to overlook. You know when they\u0026rsquo;re being cautious and when they\u0026rsquo;re being genuinely worried. You know who to call when you have a question in a domain that isn\u0026rsquo;t yours.\nThe programme also introduced me to people beyond the cohort — the coaches, the faculty, the senior figures who came to review the CCP. Some of those connections have mattered more than I expected at the time.\nWhat It Opened Up When SpaceTech 13 finished in 2011, I went back to DLR with a different perspective on what I was doing there and why. The business engineering module had changed how I thought about programme justification and stakeholder management. The systems engineering module had deepened my existing knowledge while also challenging some assumptions I\u0026rsquo;d carried forward uncritically from YES2. The CCP had given me experience leading and coordinating across a diverse team under genuine time pressure toward a real deliverable.\nWithin a relatively short time, I took on new responsibilities at DLR that I don\u0026rsquo;t think I would have been in a position to pursue as confidently without the programme. More broadly, it planted seeds that have grown slowly but persistently since — an interest in the business side of the industry that the purely technical track had never really fed, a sharper awareness of where technical capability and strategic thinking need to connect, and a clearer sense of what I eventually want to do with the combination.\nSpaceTech also gave me my first sustained exposure to the intersection of space systems and the commercial internet economy — a theme that was speculative in 2011 and is now reshaping the entire industry. MOBEO was, in retrospect, a fairly accurate description of what companies like Planet and Capella Space and a dozen others would go on to attempt, with mixed success, over the following decade. We had the analysis broadly right. What was missing, in 2011, was the falling launch costs and the miniaturisation of satellite hardware that would eventually make the economics work at smaller scale than we had modelled. Whether MOBEO as conceived would have succeeded is genuinely unknowable — but working through the problem was valuable regardless of the answer.\nThe SpaceTech programme at TU Delft is no longer at Delft. It moved to Graz, where it continues under a different institutional home but, from what I understand, a similar philosophy. I\u0026rsquo;m glad I did it when I did it, in the cohort I did it with, at the institutions we visited. The sessions at ESTEC had a particular resonance for me — I had first visited Noordwijk as a student on YES2, learning to solder space-rated connectors in a clean room. Returning years later as a working engineer to study systems engineering in the building next door felt like something closing and something else opening at the same time.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s probably the most honest description of what SpaceTech was for me: not a credential, though the Master\u0026rsquo;s degree from Delft is real, but a transition. A deliberate step from one version of a career to the next, taken with fifteen people worth knowing, through five cities worth visiting, on a project worth doing.\n","permalink":"https://patrick-hambloch.de/en/career/spacetech13/","summary":"\u003ch1 id=\"spacetech--letting-me-see-the-space-world-from-different-angles\"\u003eSpaceTech — Letting me see the space world from different angles.\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSometime in 2010, I found myself at DLR wondering what came next. YES2 had been a formative experience, building real hardware, learning real systems engineering. But it had also shown me how much I didn\u0026rsquo;t know. I was an electrical engineer who had stumbled into space through a combination of curiosity and luck, and the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be felt wide. I started looking for something that would close it deliberately.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"SpaceTech — Mastering Space Systems"},{"content":"YES2 SpaceMail — What It Was Like to Build a Satellite as a Student Twenty years ago, a 30-kilometre thread of polyethylene fibre — thinner than a guitar string — unspooled from a Russian spacecraft over the steppes of Kazakhstan. At the end of that thread hung a small spherical capsule called Fotino, packed with science payload and a parachute, trying to become the first object ever delivered from orbit to Earth without a rocket engine. The experiment was called YES2. I helped build it.\nLooking back now, it\u0026rsquo;s one of those projects that sounds more implausible the more you explain it. Hundreds of students. Twenty-two countries. Five years of development on a shoestring budget. A 30 km tether that would briefly become the longest man-made object in space. And a team where most of the engineers — myself included — were learning what a Critical Design Review even was while simultaneously trying to pass one.\nImage credit: Delta-Utec SRC\nThe Idea: SpaceMail The concept behind the second Young Engineers\u0026rsquo; Satellite, or YES2, was elegant in the way that genuinely clever engineering ideas tend to be. Rather than using a rocket to slow a re-entry capsule down from orbital speed, you exploit gravity and orbital mechanics to do the work for free.\nHere\u0026rsquo;s the basic physics: if you dangle a mass below a spacecraft on a long tether, the lower object sits in a slightly different gravitational field and moves at a slightly different orbital velocity. The longer the tether, the bigger the effect. Deploy enough tether — 30 km in YES2\u0026rsquo;s case — swing the capsule down and forward in the right arc, cut it loose at exactly the right moment, and it re-enters the atmosphere on a trajectory that takes it to a specific point on the ground. No fuel. No retro-rocket. Just a very, very long string and some careful orbital mechanics.\nThe concept had been proposed in 1994 by Dutch astronaut Wubbo Ockels. The small Dutch company Delta-Utec, led by Michiel Kruijff and Erik van der Heide, had been working to turn it into a real demonstration ever since. YES2 was that demonstration, flying as a 36 kg passenger on the Foton-M3 microgravity mission in September 2007. A Dutch-led project, designed and built by hundreds of students from 22 countries, on an ESA mission, aboard a Russian spacecraft — a true international endeavour.\nThe hardware came in three parts. FLOYD (Foton Located YES2 Deployer) was the 22 kg tether deployer, bolted directly onto the Foton spacecraft. It housed the tether spool — 31.7 km of 0.5 mm Dyneema wound with extraordinary precision onto an aluminium core — plus the on-board computer, the ejection system, and a barberpole brake mechanism that controlled deployment speed by friction. MASS (Mechanical and data Acquisition Support System) was the 8 kg subsatellite at the other end of the tether, carrying science instruments and the GPS receiver. And Fotino was the 6 kg spherical re-entry capsule, 40 cm across, clad in alumina ceramic and silicon ablator, containing pressure sensors, thermocouples, an Argos beacon, and a parachute that was supposed to open at 5 km altitude.\nDeployment happened in two stages. First, MASS and Fotino were spring-ejected from FLOYD at 2.4 m/s and the tether paid out slowly to 3.5 km over one full orbit, while a controller kept tension levels stable. Then a command triggered the second stage: the brake released, gravity gradient forces took over, and the tether deployed at exponentially increasing speed to its full 30 km length in about 35 minutes. At full extension, the tether swung back underneath Foton like a pendulum. At the bottom of that swing, a timer fired three small pyrotechnic cutters to release Fotino. Ten seconds later, FLOYD cut the tether on the Foton end, freeing MASS and the remaining tether to burn up on re-entry. Fotino was on its own.\nThe whole active mission lasted less than seven hours.\nA written description of the mission is necessarily technical — luckily there is a rather nice video that brings the whole thing to life: The Team YES2 was, officially, a project of ESA\u0026rsquo;s Education Department, managed by Delta-Utec. In practice it was something stranger and more interesting: a distributed network of university groups — called Centers of Expertise — each responsible for a specific technical domain, coordinating across time zones and language barriers with whatever tools students typically have access to, which is to say: not many good ones.\nFour Centers of Expertise carried the main technical load. Samara State Aerospace University in Russia handled mission analysis and GPS. The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy developed the Fotino re-entry capsule. The University of Patras in Greece covered mechanical and thermal systems. And Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld, Germany — my university — was responsible for the tether.\nOver the five-year project lifetime, around 400 students from 50 universities contributed in some form. At any given moment, 40 to 60 were actively working. Students cycled through on three-to-six month internships, which created a constant challenge of knowledge transfer — by the time someone really understood the system, it was often time for them to leave.\nHow I Got Involved I first heard about YES2 from a professor in class. With internship season coming up, space sounded like a genuinely interesting direction — so I applied. Together with three other students from Krefeld, I was accepted. Starting in July 2006, I became the Harnessing Systems Engineer for YES2, while also contributing to the system engineering tool ALBATRoS.\nI moved to Leiden in the Netherlands, sharing apartments with other students on the project — the kind of living arrangement that comes with doing a six-month internship at a small startup working on a satellite. When I joined, the project was already in its final stretch, about a year out from launch. Design work was largely done; the hardware had to be built. Initially I worked out of the Delta-Utec office in Leiden, where students were crammed around tables and every other available surface — very different from what I had imagined a space project would look like.\nIt turned out that the students before me had spent very little time thinking about the harness, so I had to work out a large portion of it myself, with guidance from Michiel, Fabio De Pascale, and experts from ESA at the European Space and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, about 30 minutes away. At ESTEC I worked closely with Jason Page, who gave us access to the clean room to produce all the cables for the satellite and showed me how to solder space-rated connections and handle flight hardware properly.\nOne thing worth noting: while YES2 was a student project in name, the hardware itself was entirely proper space-rated equipment. The satellite went through the full qualification test campaign before launch — shaker tests, thermal cycling, electromagnetic compatibility testing, and more. This was partly to ensure the mission would succeed, but also to give ESA confidence that we wouldn\u0026rsquo;t damage any of the other experiments or flight systems aboard Foton. The standards were real, and meeting them with a student team was no small thing. After all, in the end the hardware we built ended up on the very real Foton-M3, a failure of our hardware could have led to a problem for them - like entangling the spacecraft in 30km of tether, which could have meant the failure of the whole research mission and not just that of a student project.\nImage credit: ESA\nSo I spent months designing and manufacturing the harness. That meant making sure each individual connection was properly documented in the engineering database, verifying the shielding concept, and then spending weeks in the clean room soldering and crimping connections. In later jobs I worked extensively with circular military connectors, which aren\u0026rsquo;t cheap — but nothing quite compares to space-rated hardware, where the qualification documentation alone can cost nearly as much as the parts themselves. At the time I didn\u0026rsquo;t fully appreciate how unusual it was to be handed that kind of responsibility as a student. Looking back, it was a remarkable amount of trust to place in someone who had never built anything remotely like it before.\nALBATRoS: Building the Tool While Using It The team figured out pretty early that managing a satellite project across many universities, with a rotating cast of students and no shared tooling, was nearly as hard as the engineering itself — and the harness was a good example of why. Every connection, every signal, every pin assignment had to live somewhere that the whole team could access and trust.\nWhich is why, in parallel with the hardware work, a small team led by Fabio De Pascale built ALBATRoS — Automated Listing, Budgeting And Tracing Repository. It was a web-based system engineering database that tried to pull together everything the project needed in one place: parts lists, mass budgets, requirements, harness documentation, design review actions, task assignments, contact information. The idea was simple: if you had one tool, accessible to everyone at any time from anywhere, you could replace the endless cycle of someone collecting inputs into a spreadsheet, reformatting them, chasing the gaps, and producing a document that was already out of date by the time it arrived.\nIt sounds straightforward. It was not. But by the time YES2 reached its integration phase, ALBATRoS had become the backbone of the project\u0026rsquo;s configuration control. Engineers who had never used a formal system engineering tool were navigating it naturally — starting, typically, with the phone book feature — and gradually working their way up to filing Review Item Discrepancies and generating harness production documents automatically from the database.\nLooking back through the lens of what PLM and requirements management tools try to do today, ALBATRoS was ahead of its time for something built by students with no budget and a lot of determination. In fact, in many projects since, I\u0026rsquo;ve found myself wishing I had something equivalent. The real secret, I think, was that Fabio and his team were building the tool while also being deep inside the project — a tight feedback loop that meant every new feature solved a real problem someone had that week. That dynamic is something I want to explore further at some point, with AI agents as a modern equivalent.\nSeptember 25, 2007 The mission executed on the 11th day of the Foton-M3 flight, one day before Foton\u0026rsquo;s own re-entry. Ground control in Moscow sent the time-tagged telecommands. FLOYD powered up. MASS and Fotino ejected cleanly. The tether paid out.\nPost-mission analysis confirmed the tether deployed to its full 31.7 km — a new world record for the longest artificial structure in space, later recognized in the Guinness Book of Records. The tether was reportedly visible to the naked eye from parts of South America and Russia, appearing larger than the Moon.\nFotino was never found.\nImage credit: Delta-Utec SRC\nThe capsule separated as planned, but no signal was ever received from it after re-entry. Calculations suggested it may have landed somewhere near the Aral Sea, or possibly burned up entirely. The ARGOS beacon that was supposed to triangulate its position within three hours of landing remained silent. For a project that had taken five years and 400 people to build, that silence was hard to sit with.\nAs for me — I wasn\u0026rsquo;t watching from a control room. Together with Michiel, Erik, and Marco Stelzer, I had written the overview paper on the YES2 project, and together with Fabio a paper on ALBATRoS, and I was presenting both at the International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad, India, with ESA\u0026rsquo;s support. By a remarkable coincidence, I was standing at the podium presenting the YES2 mission paper at almost exactly the moment the actual mission was executing in orbit above us.\nAfterwards, waiting for news, I found myself in the congress\u0026rsquo;s internet café with Wubbo Ockels himself — the astronaut who had originally proposed the SpaceMail concept back in 1994.\nBoth of us refreshed whatever screens we could find, hoping for a signal from Fotino. It never came.\nIn many ways, that September was a surreal experience.\nWhat It Left Behind The tether technology itself never made it to a follow-on operational mission — space debris removal and propellantless re-entry remain active research areas, but the path from demonstration to operational system is long. YES2 remains one of only three experiments ever to demonstrate tether-assisted payload delivery from orbit.\nWhat stayed with me more immediately were lessons that had nothing to do with orbital mechanics. Running a project across geographies with limited resources and high turnover forces you to build systems and processes that work without you. ALBATRoS was one expression of that instinct — the recognition that if information lives in someone\u0026rsquo;s head or in a local spreadsheet, it\u0026rsquo;s already half-lost. Distributed teams need shared ground truth, and the system engineer\u0026rsquo;s job is to create and protect that ground truth, not to hoard it. It\u0026rsquo;s a principle I\u0026rsquo;ve carried into every project since.\nMore broadly, YES2 changed the trajectory of my career — and my life, really. Without it, I probably wouldn\u0026rsquo;t have gone into the space industry or started working at DLR, where I went on to be responsible for the operations of ESA\u0026rsquo;s Materials Science Laboratory onboard the International Space Station. It\u0026rsquo;s hard to put into words how much I learned, both professionally and personally. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.\nTwenty years on, it\u0026rsquo;s still the most technically ambitious thing I\u0026rsquo;ve been part of by some margin. A half-millimetre thread, 30 kilometres long, unspooling in orbit. A spherical capsule made of foam and ceramic trying to survive 750 kW/m² of re-entry heating. A team of students, somehow, making it work.\nAlmost all of it worked.\n","permalink":"https://patrick-hambloch.de/en/career/yes2/","summary":"\u003ch1 id=\"yes2-spacemail--what-it-was-like-to-build-a-satellite-as-a-student\"\u003eYES2 SpaceMail — What It Was Like to Build a Satellite as a Student\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwenty years ago, a 30-kilometre thread of polyethylene fibre — thinner than a guitar string — unspooled from a Russian spacecraft over the steppes of Kazakhstan. At the end of that thread hung a small spherical capsule called Fotino, packed with science payload and a parachute, trying to become the first object ever delivered from orbit to Earth without a rocket engine. The experiment was called YES2. I helped build it.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"YES2 — Young Engineers' Satellite 2"}]