Thermal Engineer

Karman+ is building the first logistics chain in space for the regolith age. Today everything we use in orbit — fuel, water, materials — is launched from Earth, which keeps every mission slow, expensive and small. Asteroids already hold those resources in orbit. We build the spacecraft and systems to go get them.

Our first mission launches in 2028 to rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis — a deep-space mission designed, built and tested by our team in Broomfield, Colorado, on a startup timeline and budget. We develop most of our own hardware, from power and propulsion electronics to RF systems and payloads, and we test it in our own facilities.

The role

You will own thermal for the spacecraft, from component level up to system. At system level, the model, the environments and the control design that take the vehicle from a rideshare orbit through an Earth-escape spiral with ~1,900 eclipses, out to 1.2 AU, and into close proximity with a tumbling asteroid. At component level, the hands-on work: heaters and thermistors, radiators and interfaces, the thermal design of the boxes we build ourselves, and the thermal-vacuum campaigns that prove them in our own chamber.

Requirements

• Day to day you will
• Own the spacecraft thermal model and analysis: environments across the mission, hot and cold cases, eclipse transients, and the asteroid-proximity phase where the surface is a significant radiative source.
• Design the thermal control system (radiators, coatings, MLI, heaters, thermal straps, interfaces) and close the heater power and radiator budgets with the power team.
• Solve the hard local problems: a high-power electric-propulsion power unit rejecting hundreds of watts, GaN RF amplifiers, a battery with a tight temperature window, a xenon tank whose pressure sets a temperature limit, and a flexible solar array that swings 200 °C per orbit early in the mission.
• Do the component-level thermal design for in-house electronics boxes with the avionics and power teams: board-to-chassis conduction paths, TIM selection, junction-temperature predictions that feed radiation derating.
• Plan and run thermal-vacuum tests — component, box and spacecraft level — in our own facility: test design, instrumentation, profiles, model correlation and reports.
• Specify and procure thermal hardware and coatings, and own cleanliness and outgassing compliance for what we fly.
• Support integration, launch-site operations and in-flight thermal monitoring.
• You’ll fit if you have
• Worked in spacecraft thermal engineering with at least one program taken through thermal-vacuum test and ideally through flight.
• Fluency in a spacecraft thermal analysis tool (Thermal Desktop/SINDA, ESATAN or equivalent) and the judgement to know when the model is wrong.
• Hands-on test experience: instrumenting hardware, running a TVAC chamber, correlating a model to data.
• Working knowledge of thermal hardware and materials (heaters, MLI, coatings, straps, TIMs) and how they behave over a multi-year deep-space mission.
• The habit of owning the whole thing: requirements, analysis, hardware, test, documentation.
• Comfort with a small team where you’ll make the calls.
• Nice to have
• Deep-space or GEO mission experience
• Electronics thermal design
• Cryogenic or high-power electric-propulsion thermal
• Experience with small-body proximity environments
• Familiarity with F Prime-style telemetry for in-flight thermal monitoring.
• Required
• US work authorization