Q&A with Richard Kalantar, Electrical Engineer
Q: What is electrical engineering? Why does it matter on a satellite?
Electrical engineering is one of the fundamental engineering disciplines and as such many engineering subdisciplines are derived from it. It is the engineering discipline dealing with development, characterization and manufacturing of active systems including analog, power and digital electronics, as well as systems that go in communications, sensing, computation, and information theory subdisciplines. The relevance of electrical engineering on any complex systems, including aerospace, is self-evident because complex systems have many active subsystems. A satellite is a complex system that performs various functions including power conversion and distribution, command and data handling, communication, sensing, attitude control, and navigation, to name a few, all of which are achieved by various electrical modules and subsystems.
Q: You’ve worked on everything from self driving cars to satellites—why are you working with Apex now?
As the founder and lead consultant of Ohaniom Enterprises, I enjoy working on challenging engineering opportunities. Apex Space is a startup that is looking to revolutionize the spacecraft bus manufacturing by standardizing the bus functionality and interfaces so that payload providers can design towards a set of defined specifications for integrating their payload with a given bus. The schedule and technical challenges on this project are very intriguing and I really enjoy working with Apex team on these tasks.
Q: What’s the hardest problem you’ve ever had to solve?
Chasing down sources of spurs and ground loops in an electronics design and making them go away is always a hard problem to solve. Those are among the hardest problems for me to solve in various projects.
Q: What are you most proud of from your career?
Building lasting relationships with colleagues who worked on projects over the years! In my opinion, people are the most important part of each project and I am proud of being part of good engineering teams that have delivered complex systems for different applications.
Q: If you weren’t an electrical engineer, what would you be?
Hard to say...perhaps a movie director!