Lead Lunar Thermal Engineer for Space Habitat

Telemetry Today LLC; Long Beach (CA); On-site; USD 147,000 - 249,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

Paid time off

401(k) plan

Lunch subsidies

Job summary

Vast seeks a Senior Thermal Engineer, Lunar, to own thermal architecture for lunar surface hardware and to lead the design from first-order trades through flight readiness. You will define radiators, fluids, heat pipes, MLI, coatings, and survival heating, ensuring margins across launch, cruise, descent, and landed phases.

You will develop standards and support NASA deliverables. This is a full-time, exempt role based in Long Beach, CA, with opportunities to influence an expanding lunar program

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Physics or a related technical discipline.
• 6+ years of spacecraft or aerospace thermal engineering experience.
• Spacecraft thermal control design and analysis experience.
• Built and correlated thermal models for flight hardware.
• Experience with extreme-environment or wide-swing thermal design where both hot and cold cases were design-driving.
• Familiar with thermal coatings, MLI, radiators, heat pipes, thermal straps, and heater/thermostat design.
• Comfortable working during early architecture phases.
• Experience across multiple thermal analysis tools (Thermal Desktop, SINDA/FLUINT, ESATAN, or equivalent)

Responsibilities

• Define the thermal control architecture for Vast's lunar surface elements - trading passive, heat pipe, pumped fluid loop, and thermal storage approaches against mass, power, complexity, and dust exposure
• Size and place radiators for the lunar surface environment, accounting for diurnal sink temperature swings, albedo and lunar IR loading, terrain and self-view blockage, and latitude-driven constraints
• Own the survival thermal case through lunar night - heater power budget, thermal mass and phase-change storage strategy, and dormancy and wake-up thermal states
• Own the habitat, airlock, and node thermal control - cabin temperature and humidity control, condensing heat exchanger, coolant loop architecture, and depress/repress thermal transients
• Build and maintain the detailed system thermal models, contribute reduced-order models to Vast's design, simulation, and validate against Thermal Desktop, SINDA/FLUINT, or equivalent
• Own the thermal budget: min/max predicted temperatures per component against qualification limits across launch, cruise, descent, landed day, landed night, and off-nominal conditions
• Select thermal coatings, MLI, heat pipes, thermal straps, isolators, heaters, and RTDs for the lunar environment, with explicit accounting for regolith dust deposition, abrasion, and UV degradation of end-of-life optical properties
• Plan and execute TVAC and thermal balance test campaigns (chamber and shroud requirements, solar and IR simulation, cold-case survival demonstration, test profiles and success criteria), then correlate models to test data
• Establish the thermal design standards, margin policy, and lunar environment definitions Vast's lunar hardware will be built on, and support design reviews, drawing checks, and NASA technical deliverables

Skills

Thermal design

Thermal analysis

Thermal Desktop

SINDA/FLUINT

ESATAN

Lunar thermal

Thermal testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering

Tools

Thermal Desktop

SINDA/FLUINT

ESATAN

Job description

Vast seeks a Senior Thermal Engineer, Lunar, to own thermal architecture for lunar surface hardware and to lead the design from first-order trades through flight readiness. You will define radiators, fluids, heat pipes, MLI, coatings, and survival heating, ensuring margins across launch, cruise, descent, and landed phases.

You will develop standards and support NASA deliverables. This is a full-time, exempt role based in Long Beach, CA, with opportunities to influence an expanding lunar program