Training 30 Shuttle Engineers at NASA Kennedy — Jason Krueger
In 2011, NASA called StratoStar's office phone and Jason Krueger assumed someone was messing with him. Not long after, he was at NASA Kennedy teaching 30 shuttle engineers to build, fly, and recover hardware at the edge of space.
Show notes
Quest to Space is a show about how engineers and scientists actually get hardware to space: the decisions, the constraints, and the setbacks along the way. Season 1 is a three-episode introduction to StratoStar Systems founder Jason Krueger, hosted by Macy Bussberg. From Season 2, Jason hosts and interviews the engineers and scientists doing the work.
In this first episode, Jason traces StratoStar from a student satellite project at Taylor University in 2002 to training shuttle engineers at NASA Kennedy in 2011, and explains what a near-space flight test gives an engineering team that a vacuum chamber cannot.
What's covered
- Why a college with 1,800 students and no engineering department entered an Air Force student-satellite competition against Michigan and Stanford, and how a balloon became the way to prove the satellite worked
- The 2011 phone call from NASA that Jason assumed was a prank, and why telling them "we work with universities, we're not Northrop Grumman" turned out to be the reason they wanted him
- Rocket University, NASA's program to retrain shuttle engineers for robotics missions, and one 8 a.m. room of 30 engineers that would not laugh
- What a near-space environment actually tests, including radiation, thermal extremes, and real radio paths, that a vacuum chamber or a mountaintop transmit test cannot reproduce
- Why customers get their hardware back, and what that changes about how fast a team can iterate
- Technology Readiness Level 7, and how flight data supports a TRL justification without waiting for a rocket
About near-space
StratoStar flies payloads to roughly 60,000 to 100,000 ft, what Jason calls "about 99% space." Hardware experiences radiation, thermal extremes, and near-vacuum, then comes back to the customer along with the flight data.
Guest: Jason Krueger, President and Founder, StratoStar Systems LLC, Indianapolis, Indiana.
Host: Macy Bussberg, Executive Assistant, StratoStar Systems.
Next episode: what "real flight test, real data" means for an engineering team, and why some of the biggest names in aerospace keep coming back to fly.
If you've got a payload, a project, or a question you've been kicking around, start a conversation at stratostar.com.
Guest
Jason Krueger
President and Founder · StratoStar Systems LLC
Jason Krueger is the founder of StratoStar Systems, a near-space platform provider based in Indianapolis. He started flying hardware to the edge of space as a business student at Taylor University in 2002, and has since built StratoStar into a flight-test operation with more than 1,000 missions flown for customers including NASA and Northrop Grumman. In 2011 he was brought into NASA Kennedy's Rocket University program to train shuttle engineers on rapid prototyping and near-space flight test.
