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Space is her place

Beech guides fortunes of a Rockville satellite systems company

Friday, Nov. 17, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Naomi Brookner⁄The Gazette My professor ‘‘provided an example that it was possible to do well in science and have a reasonable personal life as well [including marriage and children] as have a career,” said Theresa Beech, 36, managing director for GMV Space Systems of Rockville, the American subsidiary of Group GMV S.A. of Madrid, Spain.

Beech, 36, is managing director for GMV Space Systems of Rockville, the American subsidiary of Group GMV S.A. of Madrid, Spain. A native of Kalamazoo, Mich., Beech worked for aerospace and defense giant Boeing Co. at its Seattle headquarters after college. Later she moved on to Group GMV, a European engineering and software development company with more than 600 employees and annual revenues of more than $60 million.

‘‘I started at Boeing as a junior engineer working on the International Space Station project,” Beech said. ‘‘It wasn’t up yet at that time. I was working on a team that was studying various things on how to actually get it up into orbit and where to place it in orbit.”

At Group GMV, she worked on flight dynamics projects and was lead engineer and project manager for developing satellite software systems for Galileo, the European global positioning system that is similar to the GPS systems developed by the United States and Russia.

Group GMV liked Beech’s work so much that she was picked two years ago to come across the Atlantic to establish its first U.S. company. After starting from scratch, the company now has 13 employees and expects to continue to expand and reach $10 million in revenue in two years, Beech said.

The Business Gazette talked to Beech recently on her career choices and her work with Group GMV.

How did you get interested in engineering and space systems?

I liked math and science growing up, but didn’t have an exact thing I wanted to be or do. In college, I started out in chemistry. But I developed asthma — which is rather antithetical to lab work — as a freshman, and then switched to physics, which ended up being my major. I did a more applied physics track and so took some engineering and space physics and geophysics courses along the way.

From there, I decided to do a master’s in atmospheric sciences ... and studied fluid dynamics, orbital mechanics, satellite imagery and space physics, all of which are very closely linked to aerospace engineering.

How many women were in your field in college, and did you have a mentor?

I was one of two women majoring in physics [at Michigan] within my graduating class. I think that in my final 2.5 years in physics, I had a couple of classes in which there was another woman in the class. In all of the others, there were only men.

One of the professors in the physics department at Michigan did become my mentor while I was there. She did her best to help, push, encourage and promote the women students in physics. Besides being a wonderful human being and great listener, she was a gifted theoretical physicist, and had experienced far more overt discrimination than people generally would like to believe is or ever was possible.

She was important to me for several reasons. She was enormously encouraging. She encouraged me to look at non-traditional physics fields, such as fluid dynamics and other areas of physics which are traditionally done in engineering. She encouraged me to find research opportunities as soon as I could and pointed me in various directions to investigate opportunities within the related departments. She provided an example that it was possible to do well in science and have a reasonable personal life as well [including marriage and children] as have a career.

This is something I found particularly important because the general perception, and something another professor said to me quite clearly, was that while women might be able to do physics, there was no way that a woman could ever do physics and get married. And above all, she could never ever do physics and have children.

While I think that having children is a very personal decision and by no means a necessary component of life, it is quite common. And being told at 19 or 20 that ‘‘OK, maybe you can do the work, but you’ll never be able to have kids” ... is rather daunting — especially when you know that the same professor would never, ever say this same thing to a male student.

After I got my master’s, I looked around for a job for which I was qualified and which looked interesting, and ended up working as an aerospace engineer [at Boeing].

What was your main role on the space station project?

I was responsible for the launch and orbital trajectory analysis. We were trying to determine the best way to launch the module so as to minimize the fuel consumption, as well as minimize the amount of atomic oxygen exposure that the module would receive in orbit both generally, as well as on particular parts of the module.

Some parts were more sensitive to atomic oxygen exposure than others. I was also asked to determine how much atomic oxygen corrosion the module could experience under a variety of solar activity conditions — solar activity strongly influences how much atomic oxygen can be found at various altitudes above the Earth.

In general, atomic oxygen is considered a bad thing for spacecraft because it will corrode the spacecraft metal casing. Space is hazardous to things like satellites. First, it’s minus 250 degrees and then the air is atomic oxygen, which causes a lot of rust, so you have to think about that.

How did you get to GMV?

My husband, who is a Spanish national, ran into a problem with his visa and had to leave the country for six months before he could come back in. So we went back to Spain, and I got a job at GMV. I didn’t know anything about the company, but GMV is very big in Europe.

At first my work [on Galileo project] was almost purely technical — the definition and specification of the Galileo Orbitography and Time Synchronization Processing Facility and the Galileo Integrity Processing Facility — these are the technical heart of the Galileo ground system and by far the largest and most critical components — and other related studies. Then I moved into project management and finally project coordination.

Why did GMV enter the U.S. market?

GMV had gotten to a point where they dominated the market in Europe and couldn’t grow any further. So they decided they would put a subsidiary in the United States and they did their studies of where would be the best place to put it, considering all kinds of factors and they decided on Rockville. When we started I was the salesperson, business development, and also did engineering, project management and some financial, accounting work.

So you did the knocking on doors, trying to get contracts?

Yes [laughs], that was me. It took us 15 months to get our first contract.

For one thing, no one knew who we were. They’d say ‘‘GMV?” So it’s not like you’re in a market and here comes Lockheed Martin calling, and they say, ‘‘Oh, sure Lockheed.”

No one knew us. And the owners of the company, traditionally have kept a low profile. They like it that way.

What was your first contract?

It was for WorldSpace, the satellite radio company, for $250,000. They were located in D.C. then; now they are in Silver Spring. That was to do the ground-based software that controls the satellites they use.

What is your company doing for mission control for the NASA lunar mission?

That was for FlexPlan, which is the software system on the ground which is responsible for scheduling all of the scientific instruments and the computer memory on board the spacecraft.

Since the tasks which the instruments need to do varies, and there can be conflicts between instruments, such as one instrument cannot be on at the same time as another Instrument because together they use too much power from the spacecraft battery, FlexPlan establishes priorities between the various tasks which need to be done, and the various instruments, and then generates a schedule for all of these instrument tasks.

On a spacecraft, the lack of [planning and scheduling] could lead to losing scientific data, overwriting data in the on-board memory, or even causing the satellite to draw down its battery too far before being able to be recharged from the solar panels, and thereby causing the spacecraft to ... temporarily power down. Since a scientific spacecraft is judged in part by the amount of useable scientific data it returns, losing data is a serious problem ... meaning lower return on investment than expected in financial terms.