This is a Passion Project
Our goal is to keep Space Steps free forever. And ad free, too. We support the costs mostly by paying out of pocket. Contracting work we do is used to first pay for company expenses. Anything left over is folded back into projects that improve our learning and support materials.
Space Steps is the public-facing website of bitValence, a Public Benefit Corporation (B-Corp) with a legally stated purpose of “to promote student achievement in the space industry with software, hardware, and education materials.” We also run Open STEMware, a 501c3 non-profit with the same goals. We chose to have a B-Corporation to protect the intellectual assets and allow us to use them to support corporate education exercises without the legally gray areas that come with 501c3’s. (We’re engineers, not lawyers and accountants, so we try to keep things simple for ourselves.)
The People
Dr. Bill Tandy
https://www.linkedin.com/in/billtandy
Bill started his career at what was then known as Ball Aerospace. From 2003 until 2019, he worked his way from being an intern in the structural analysis department to being the mission architect for programs including MethaneSat. From there, he moved to Blue Origin where he was the “Branch Chief” of all the mission architects in the Advanced Concepts division. Among other achievements, he was the mission architect/chief engineer of the Orbital Reef space station from concept through NASA’s $130M award. His next career move was as Gravitics’ Chief Engineer where he was responsible for all technical decisions. With Gravitics being a startup, work naturally included “all the things” from contract development to hiring to hands on work and more.
Bill has been the leader and/or primary proposal contributor to over $350M worth of awards. He has also participated on NASA review boards. Additional time is spent supporting investors with due diligence to help them decide whether to invest in companies or not.
One of the things that became clear is that the industry can provide brilliant careers but, being dense with technical topics and jargon, it can be difficult to break into. So he started Space Steps as a free resource to help people do better on job interviews and maybe help them up the learning curve a bit as well.
Dave McComas
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-mccomas-08995b135
Dave retired from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2019 after a 34-year career working on flight software. He predominantly worked on in-house flight projects starting as a flight software developer for the Hubble Space Telescope (1990 launch) and concluding as the flight software product lead for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission (2014 launch). He was part of the original core Flight System (cFS) technical team and helped with its open-source release in 2015.
Dave spent his last few years at NASA helping organizations adopt the cFS for their projects. At this time, the commercial aerospace industry was rapidly expanding and many universities were developing CubeSats. NASA created incentives programs that allowed him to provide cFS education and consultation to several organizations.
After retiring, Dave continued his passion for free education by creating the Open STEMware Foundation. He developed OpenSatKit and cFS Basecamp to help people learn and adopt the cFS for their needs. He is excited to be a part of Space Steps.