Bryan Cline: bowler, saxophonist, space mission designer

Bryan Cline admits his interests are broad. For his undergrad degree, he double majored in aerospace engineering and saxophone performance at Wichita State, a powerhouse AE school that he first became aware of because of its impressive record of national bowling titles and having attended bowling camp there since he was 10. Now, as a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he is laser focused on a career as a space mission designer.

Cline recently had an opportunity to exercise his aerospace chops as one of an 18-member cohort in NASA’s Heliophysics Mission Design School. The program begins with 10 weeks of homework assignments and two online lectures per week and culminates in one whirlwind week at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Cline said his group initially proposed science objectives they were individually interested in, then narrowed it down until they came up with one complete concept.

“Because every mission needs a good name and an acronym, we chose CRIMP which stands for Compression and Reconnection Investigations of the Magnetopause,” he said. The magnetopause is the boundary where the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the incoming solar wind and incoming particles from the sun. The goal of the mission was to understand the medium-scale phenomena of the magnetopause.

“Everyone on the team had an individual subsystem and contributed in different ways, but everyone had their own piece of the pie,” Cline said. “I was elected the lead systems engineer for the team, so I was accountable for all of the technical elements of the design to make sure everything was feasible from a technical and cost perspective. We worked with Team X, the advanced design concepts team at JPL, and presented our concept about halfway through the program to get their initial feedback.”

Throughout the program, JPL mentors provided guidance. During the culminating week, Robert Miller was Cline’s primary assigned mentor. He also worked with Steve Zusack. Both are systems engineers at JPL. Another member of the cohort, Kelly Caldwell, served as deputy systems engineer for that week.

“Robert and Steve were good at helping us identify the key issues,” Cline said. “But what was cool is that they gave Kelly and me a lot of latitude to lead those discussions. We were the ones who were the real experts on the mission concept we were trying to propose.

“They were very open to our ideas, but they used their experience to guide us and make sure we got to the end point.  We weren't shooting at a target that we couldn’t hit. It was cool to have their expertise, but also their trust.”

Cline described his job as a systems engineer, particularly during the final week at JPL, as running around putting out fires.

“The biggest fire we had to deal with due to the spacecraft needing to rotate at 15 revolutions per minute to get the data we needed. As a result, we had a lot of trouble getting the data to the ground. We could collect data, but with a spinning spacecraft, there are fewer opportunities for communications with the ground.  On Monday of the week at JPL, our team spent the whole night trying to solve that problem. They let me lead the Tuesday morning briefing to explain the problem and how we were going to solve it.”

Cline said the rotation rate was non-negotiable.

“We thought about spinning down the spacecraft to dump the data and then spinning back up, but that would use a ton of propellant. We had to be clever with how to handle the data on board, what data to downlink, and what antenna and communication system to use. This was a big challenge for us. It took the systems chair, the propulsion chair, the attitude chair, the communications, the ground systems, the structures chair…everyone to solve this problem, while also communicating with the science team to make sure we answered the objectives they needed. That was a really big fire. It drove everything. If you get to space, you collect the data, but can't get it to the ground, you don't have a mission.”

Cline said the week at JPL was intense. “We didn’t get a lot of sleep. They took us on tours of JPL and we heard some excellent lectures, but we were mainly working on this concept. On Friday we presented it in a preliminary gate review to a NASA review panel the included folks from JPL, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, the Southwest Research Institute, NASA Goddard, and NASA Headquarters. We passed our gate review and received glowing comments. They could tell that everybody was invested. So, it was great. Just not a lot of sleep that week.”

Cline’s advisers at Illinois are Joshua Rovey and Robyn Woollands.

Did Cline ever seriously consider saxophone performance as a career?

“Not really. There was a brief period early in college when I was enjoying music more than all of the basic engineering classes, but yeah, rocket science was always the place I was going to end up. My favorite thing about aerospace engineering and engineering more broadly is it’s a team sport. If we’re going to solve the big problems, we need teams. We need diverse teams. We need people with all kinds of specialties to solve these problems.

“The mission design school gave me an opportunity to work with a bunch of people in a field outside of what I already know and solve a big problem in a team environment. That was exciting for me. And it was an eye-opening experience to get out of an academic environment. I learned skills that aren't taught in either an engineering or a science academic curriculum. I got to work with 17 other excellent researchers and solve hard problems. It confirmed for me that this is what I want to do.”