My role within the German Aerospace Center (or DLR, as most people also call it in English) started one year ago. I started as a parental leave cover at the Galileo Competence Center in system and technology consulting. Since only one person had been doing the job of so far, I took on responsibility right from the start. After my colleague's return, there are now the two of us working in this position, which is not always entirely self-explanatory.

So to answer the question of what my role in system and technology consulting within DLR looks like, we need to firstly focus on Galileo and the work at our competence center.

Probably, for most of you, Galileo is not just an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, but also known as the European Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), that not only powers your navigation apps on the way to the next café but also is a vital part of our economies through its various use cases in agriculture, the automotive industry, finance, etc.. As Galileo is a wonderful joint project that supports millions of Europeans every day, my institution at DLR has set itself the task of further supporting the development of technologies related to Galileo and navigation. As Galileo Competence Center, we thus work on how future Galileo systems can be designed to maximize the benefits to the user community, which technologies are most likely to make a difference and which enhancements and changes are most effective. Together with DLR's scientific institutes and facilities and other research partners, the performance of Galileo and other existing GNS systems is being analysed and new ideas and promising technologies are being developed, tested and validated.

All of that is a big task that we just started establishing a few years ago. As you can imagine, such an endeavor needs a lot of different perspectives and more than just technical work since it touches upon many different stakeholders in a very complex environment. And that is where I come in. My role is a mix of public affairs, stakeholder management as well as the monitoring and analysis of trends in the GNSS community.

I spend quite a lot of time travelling to conferences to build up our network in industry, politics and society and to engage with various stakeholders so that we can both identify user needs in navigation and spread our work and expertise across the sector. I also work with colleagues to formulate interdisciplinary analyses that we use internally and for various stakeholders. My tasks are therefore often at the interface between technology and politics/industry/society as well as between our technical departments, communications and other external stakeholders.

As you can easily imagine from reading my answer to the first question, my job has many facets and often requires a “translator” between different actors. The space sector offers amazing technologies that have and can have a huge impact on our daily lives. If you just look at GNSS and Galileo for example, you can easily see that the outage/failure of navigation services would cost society a lot, not only monetary-wise. In safety and rescue services, for example, GNSS is important and decisive. This huge dependency on space technologies is not always present in everyone’s minds and space can do better in translating the advantages of its services and technologies into a language that actors without a technical or aerospace background understand. Moreover, with the growing dependency on space and its commercialization and application in non-space sectors, we also need to think more about the social and legal/regulatory consequences of this development. It is precisely for such issues that it is particularly important to think in a multidisciplinary way and bring more people from non-technical fields into the space sector.

As you can see from the stories on WE WORK IN SPACE, a lot is already happening and, as my job also shows, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking is becoming increasingly important.

Three things I have learnt:

- You can find your spot in space, even if it feels tricky sometimes. There will be days where you might question whether you are the right fit in this technical field. But like with everything in life and probably also with every career decision, you will have your ups and downs. Do not let the difficult moments define your experience but ask yourself what you can learn from them.

- Build yourself a network and reach out to people. One thing that really helped me so far was reaching out to and meeting different people. The space bubble is not that big as other sectors and you will easily get the chance to interact with people and their stories. Whether that is through organisations like SGAC (Space Generation Advisory Council), via dm on LinkedIn, on conferences or within your own office.

- Ask questions and stay curious. People are mostly happy to help and I met many colleagues who are more than willing to answer your questions (also and especially technically related). More than that, these same colleagues will often be just as grateful if you share your experience and expertise as well.