Up close and personal with Marco and Joost, ArianeGroup engineers working on the Susie project

Marco and Joost are ArianeGroup experts working on the future of space exploration. Here they give an insight into their daily activities and their vision of space in three words to three questions.

Three words to describe your work?

Marco 

1. Creativity

Creativity is used every day in my job to solve the problems of the team and of the project.

1. Toughness

I have to be rigorous every day. I have to be rigorous in understanding the physics and the problems that I solve. `

1. Synthesis

Synthesis is quite important. Both internally to discuss with the team, to drive people, but also for communication, to have a synthetic understanding of what we are talking about and what we are addressing.

Joost 

1. Structuration

Structuration because human space flight is an incredibly wide topic, both from a stakeholder point of view, and also technically because you need to structure it. So all day, we are structuring and making sure that we know what we are talking about today.

1. Simplification

Simplification, because we tend to over-complicate things when we don’t take care and so we need to come back to the essentials, to what we really, really need.

1. Incremental

Incremental, because you cannot do cargo and human space flight in one day. But we need to advance every day, step by step, delivering concrete results.

Three human qualities you need to succeed in your daily tasks?

Marco 

1. The ability to listen

I have to listen carefully to what people tell me and what the message is they have to deliver.

1. Analysis

Analysis is very important. It goes together with the first word “listening” – but when I hear something, I then have to analyze it. I have to understand it properly and check how it fits all together.

1. Mental flexibility

We need mental flexibility on such a project to solve the different problems and different issues that we might encounter every day.

Joost 

1. Clarity

Clarity on where we are going and what we need to do today to get there.

1. Passionate

Passionate because space is hard and sometimes things don’t go as you want, but with passion, you can always get there.

1. Pushing

Pushing, because even when we have difficult problems ahead, we know that if we push that we will be able to solve them.

Three essential elements to advance space innovation?

Marco 

1. Passion

Passion is the fuel that you need to have every day for working on such a project.

1. Vision

Combined with passion, you need a vision. You need to be able to see far away. It’s quite important in the space industry to think far ahead.

1. Temps

We have to be patient. We have to think far ahead, we have to have a vision, as I just said. But also we need to understand that things take time to come to fruition. And it’s absolutely necessary to mature ideas and to come up with well designed solutions.

Joost 

1. Sustainability

Sustainability because it’s the only way that we will be able to continue to benefit from space.

1. Eye-level cooperation

Eye-level cooperation because human space flight will widen the cooperation capabilities Europe has for the advancement of space exploration.

1. Spirit of conquest

Spirit of conquest, because that is the essence of what that drives us.

Thanks to Marco and Joost for highlighting this important space vocabulary!

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