Whitacre College graduate Joe Quirk worked on a spacecraft carrying a Texas Tech professor’s instrument to the moon’s surface as part of 10 NASA payload services.
In a long lab coat, hairnet, gloves and classic Crocs – all pristine white as the clean room itself – Joe Quirk meticulously prepared for this new year.
As the “CAD Guy” for Firefly Aerospace, a nod to his skills in computer-aided design, he had the opportunity to turn rough sketches of a lunar lander with four landing legs and two honeycomb panel decks into a feasible feat.
And Jan. 15, Joe watched what he helped create from an entirely different view when the Blue Ghost lunar lander launched onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral en route to the moon. The unmanned spacecraft will attempt to land on the moon’s surface with precious cargo – 10 science and technology instruments that will carry out operations on behalf of NASA for a complete lunar day (equal to about 14 Earth days).
“There’s actually a camera pointed back, looking across the top of the lander,” Joe explained. “Depending on where the lander is pointed, we’ll be able to see views of the Earth with the lander in the foreground. To see a picture of something I designed, built and installed looking back at the Earth, will be really, really wild.”
This out-of-world experience is one Joe never would have expected as a high schooler in Bolton, Massachusetts, who created a robotics program and (ironically) designed a robot that could play on a simulated lunar field. Nor as a mechanical engineering undergraduate at Texas Tech University from 2010 to 2014, helping his solid mechanics professor design a microrobot that could climb walls using microstructural biometric fibrillar adhesives that mimicked a gecko’s suction pads.
What he knew even back then – what attracted him to his out-of-state college in the first place – is he wanted to get his hands dirty and use engineering skills to make a difference.
“When you’re doing actual engineering and hardware projects, it really teaches you how to do problem-solving and troubleshooting and is the best way to gain practical engineering experience,” he recalled. “That got me hooked. I thought, ‘OK, yeah. This is what I want to do – build things.’”
After his graduation from the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering, Joe was hired as an aerospace engineer for L-3 Communications in Dallas, where he designed hardware and installed it on jets for the U.S. Air Force. He enjoyed the role but was looking to move closer to his soon-to-be wife in Austin, Texas.
When he saw a job posting from an aerospace rocket company located near Austin in Cedar Park, he wasted no time submitting his application. After a couple of interviews, he was hired in 2018 as one of 80 employees at Firefly, which has grown to nearly 700 during the course of the Blue Ghost mission.
“The timing kind of worked out,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, I did not expect that to happen…moving from Dallas to join a rocket company.’”
Joe first began to work on multi-mission orbital vehicles through CAD, which he describes as putting Lego blocks together virtually to build assemblies of structures in the correct scales and dimensions. Afterwards, that design can translate into engineering drawings and solid bodies (3D digital representations).
During that process for the Blue Ghost, Joe was wearing what the profession jokingly refers to as CAD goggles – fully concentrated on moving the digital image virtually and altering it as needed.
Removing those lenses and seeing the lunar lander in person three years later, in 2023, took his breath away.
“I went, ‘Oh, wow, that looks much bigger than it did on my computer,’” Joe mused. “It makes you realize that the little changes you make here and there in CAD can have big impacts on how it works in real life.”
After helping assemble and care for the six-foot-tall spacecraft mindfully – wiping it spotless with a cloth, over and over – he brimmed with anxiety late last year when he attended an environmental testing in which the lander was brutally shaken and vibrated to test its durability.
To his relief, the Blue Ghost withstood the artificial storm, giving Firefly the green light required before carrying out NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. This mission will help NASA collect data needed to send astronauts back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years under the Artemis campaign.
One of the 10 payloads onboard is the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) that will measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior through a pneumatic drill that will penetrate three meters into the ground.
Every half meter it descends, the drilling system will pause and extend a custom-built thermal probe into the surrounding rocks, dusts and pebbles. LISTER will measure two different aspects of heat flow: thermal gradient, or the changes in temperature at various depths, and thermal conductivity, or the subsurface material’s ability to let heat pass through it.
Believe it or not, LISTER became Joe’s personal favorite payload before he even knew its principal investigator hailed from his alma mater.
A Professor’s Payload
Joe first met Texas Tech’s Seiichi Nagihara, a geophysics professor, several years ago when learning more about the Blue Ghost payload requirements.
“He introduced himself as a Texas Tech professor and I was like, ‘Oh, wow! Really good to see you,’” Joe remembered.
Nagihara felt likewise to know a Red Raider was entrusted with the design of the spacecraft that would finally give his instrument the chance to perform. His work with LISTER began a couple years before Joe started college, in 2008, when he began publishing research about the creation of a heat-flow probe that could sit on the surface of the moon and accurately measure the amount of heat coming from its interior.
In 2019, he was delighted NASA selected his design to fly on a future lunar mission.
“This will put Texas Tech on the map in terms of planetary science,” he assured.
Nagihara has spent the last several years flying between Lubbock and Honeybee Robotics in Altadena, California as the company helped design and test the instrument. Once complete, Nagihara delivered LISTER to Firefly and began another exciting collaborative process.
“From Firefly’s point of view, they had to develop their spacecraft to meet the needs of the instruments they’re carrying, but at the same time, they had limitations for the payload because everything had to be very light,” he explained. “The spacecraft itself is not very big, so my team worked with Firefly to meet all of their constraints.”
LISTER was successfully integrated onto the Blue Ghost near its left foot pad and features a prominent white Double T. It will begin drilling in the first five days of the 14-day lunar surface operations, remotely controlled by Nagihara and his team from their mission operation center at Honeybee Robotics. They will stay in constant communication with NASA and Firefly throughout the mission.
Nagihara highly anticipates his instrument’s findings since such data cannot be collected from the sky through NASA’s various probes and satellites.
“Heat-flow data are very important in understanding the geologic history of any rocky planet and moon,” he said. “But on the moon, there have been only two heat-flow data collections so far and both were done by the Apollo astronauts in the 1970s. Because humans have not returned to the moon since, there has been no additional data collected there or on any other moon or planet for that matter.”
LISTER’s legacy will be the first time heat-flow data were collected on the moon solely by remote, robotic operation – but there are a lot of “ifs” standing between Nagihara and this triumph.
Stick the Landing
Neither Joe nor Nagihara slept much before Blue Ghost entered the atmosphere, and they don’t believe that will improve much post launch.
“It’s exciting, but I’ve also been constantly worried for the last couple months,” Nagihara admitted. “Everybody’s really keeping their fingers crossed.”
Once Blue Ghost makes its 45-day trip to the moon, it will face a gymnast’s challenge of sticking the landing through its shock-absorbing feet, a low center of mass and wide footprint.
“They’re going to have to not just land, but soft land on the moon upright to be able to operate all of the instruments,” Nagihara said. “So, if they can do that, that’s a major feat and we should just be happy about that.”
Joe clings to the confidence instilled in him by various tests the Blue Ghost persevered through. He also is assured by the spacecraft’s white-glove treatment to alleviate Firefly’s concerns such as foreign object debris contamination on precision optical sensors, cameras and other lenses that are sensitive to dust.
He and his teammates have come to learn even a little debris accumulation could lead to astronomical issues, like the explosion of the propulsion system.
“Some of this stuff is routine, best aerospace practice in general,” he noted, “but when you’re building a lunar lander, you ratchet that up to the to the highest extent you can to really make sure you’re not taking any chances.”
Joe’s parents, who don’t necessarily understand the technicalities of his position, eagerly watched the livestream of the launch. As did his wife, who was even more excited about the potential of his upcoming free time.
Joe felt further humbled by the support of fellow robotics classmates from Texas Tech he has kept in touch with, who ensured him they will be rooting for his success.
“They’re super excited,” Joe said, later reflecting that his younger self would have felt the same.
“Teenage Joe would be like, ‘That’s not true; you’re not doing that.’ But I’ve worked hard for it, and I’m very proud of the work we’ve done as a team.”
Once the Blue Ghost blasted into the sky, Joe waved a final goodbye to the spacecraft to which he dedicated so much time.
Following payload operations, Blue Ghost will perform its final task to capture imagery of the lunar sunset that will provide critical data the scientific community needs. The lander will then operate for several hours into the night until the brutal cold and lack of solar power drain its battery.
From that point on, indefinitely, Joe will have the privilege to look up most every night and intimately know a piece of the moon’s surface.
“I keep daydreaming maybe one day we will have a true permanent moon base where there are humans living on the moon, and one of those astronauts will walk over to our Blue Ghost landing site and see a plaque on the lander with all the names of the people who worked on it,” he shared. “People 50 to 100 years from now seeing my name on there and having some remnants of the work we did would be incredible.”