Mechanical designer working in spacecraft structures, mechanisms, and propulsion.
Spacecraft Research & Development
I guide teams toward consensus by discovering, illustrating,
and implementing shared ideas;
throughout various stages of research & development:
Objectives & Requirements
Design & Analysis
Verification & Validation
Prototyping & Production
Consulting & contracting services are available. My work with clients and employers includes:
R&D at Rocket Lab
In 2022 I joined Rocket Lab to work with the Space Systems division; where I contributed to design & production of avionics packaging for power & communications systems on various spacecraft, shown below.
R&D at Bradford Space
In 2020 I joined Bradford Space to work with a newly formed spacecraft division; where I worked on propellant tanks and propulsion systems emphasizing design for manufacturability. Among other things, I also contributed to development of the DAPPER radio cosmology mission.
R&D at Deep Space Industries
During the first space resources bubble in 2016 I joined Deep Space Industries, the world's second asteroid mining company (depending on how you count). Working at DSI I designed, analyzed, and built positive-expulsion propellant tanks for the Comet line of resistojet water thrusters.
The first Comet systems formed part of four spacecraft launched into low Earth orbit by one of the early re-used Falcon 9 vehicles on 3 December 2018. Since then, somewhere around twenty more Comet systems have flown.
Also at DSI, I contributed to the Meteor bi-propellant rocket thruster (below), as well as the Prospector & Xplorer spacecraft concepts.
(Believe it or not, as of 2025 asteroid mining is a thing again; with
vastly more funding than DSI ever had, we wish them godspeed.)
Mechanical Design and Development
of a Modular Drag Sail for the CanX-7 Nanosatellite Mission
CanX-7
was a small satellite incorporating a drag sail payload that I
designed and built at the Space Flight Laboratory of the
University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. The
payload consists of four modules deployed to form a large
square sail to de-orbit the satellite at its end of life. This
video depicts one of the many ground tests of a single
drag sail module. (I am behind the camera, muttering
"beauty!")
The sail incorporates coiled metallic tape springs and
metallized polyimide film in a low-friction damped deployment
mechanism. The illustrations below from the M.A.Sc. thesis [PDF]
I published in 2014 show the components and forces at work.
(The thesis was composed using Gingko,
a writing application that organizes hierarchical text into
ramifying columns of index cards. It is highly recommended.)
These are some publications to which I contributed during development of the CanX-7 drag sail: 2013 Smallsat paper [PDF] [HTML], 2012 Smallsat paper [PDF] [HTML], 2012 Summer Cubesat Developer's Workshop presentation [PDF] [HTML].
The PSLV-C35 launch vehicle carried CanX-7 to low Earth orbit on 26 September 2016. The sail deployed successfully in May 2017 at roughly 700 km altitude, and it re-entered four years later in April 2022; its natural decay hastened by more than a hundred years.
Past projects...
Concept Sketches
In my design practice, I make extensive use of concept
sketches to develop my own ideas and communicate with others;
often illustrating people's ideas during conversation to reach
common understanding.
Recent Photos:
Flickr Profile
I share a name with several people; including Jesse Hiemstra in the Netherlands, who from time to time signs up for services using my Gmail address; as well as people on various social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.) where I am not a member. While I do reluctantly have a LinkedIn profile, correspondence by email is vastly more effective:
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