Satellite Integration & Test

The Environment

Northrop Grumman's Dulles, VA facility is a large-scale spacecraft integration site. Most of my time was spent inside ISO Class 8 (100,000-count) cleanrooms — gowned up, on my feet for most of the shift, working alongside technicians and senior engineers on hardware that was already past the design phase.

The stakes are different from anything in a machine shop or on a racetrack: this hardware only gets built once, and it has to work the first time.

Working Across Multiple Programs

Most of my time supported Cygnus — Northrop Grumman's uncrewed cargo spacecraft that delivers supplies, equipment, and experiments to the International Space Station under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services contract — alongside a rotation of other satellite and spacecraft programs moving through the same facility. Each vehicle is assembled, integrated, and tested on-site before shipping to its launch location.

My role sat within the Integration and Testing mechanical engineering department, supporting hands-on assembly across these programs — handling flight hardware, assisting with component lifts and moves in and out of environmental test chambers, and plenty of hands-on work alongside the technician team.

Key Contributions

• Process improvement — helped simplify and standardize a multi-step bolted assembly sequence between two major spacecraft modules, reducing setup complexity for the technician team.
• Structural analysis support — reviewed and updated load specifications across a large set of satellite lifting fixtures, applying structural analysis principles to help ensure safety and compliance in mission-critical hardware operations.
• Test instrumentation support — helped set up instrumentation ahead of environmental testing that simulates the vibration and acoustic conditions of an actual launch.

What It Taught Me

Working in a cleanroom on flight hardware is a fundamentally different kind of discipline from design work. The design phase is over — now every decision is about not breaking what already exists. That constraint sharpens your attention to handling procedures, torque specs, and sequencing — skills you don't really pick up until the stakes are real.

It also showed me how a large aerospace integration program actually moves: the coordination between the ME department, technicians, quality, and program management; the role of travelers and work orders; and what it looks like when a team of specialists assembles something that has to work perfectly, once, in orbit.

All photos on this page are approved public-release images owned by Northrop Grumman Corporation. They're included here only because they're publicly available photos of work I was part of — not my property.