The Day My Project Went to Space

Hi there! It’s Tivadar from The Palindrome.

Today’s post is a very special one, written by my friend Miklós, whom I met during our PhD years. (Which was more than ten years ago. I feel old.) He is one of the smartest people I know, and he’s been doing impressive research projects since then.

One of his latest projects made the news recently, because the data collection took place on the International Space Station (ISS). This is interesting in itself, but what you rarely see is the “backend” side of science, the stuff that don’t make the news, but makes or breaks a research project of this scale.

What follows is a deep-dive report on the entire lifecycle of a space-bound project:

• grant proposal (moving from a whiteboard to orbit),

• agile problem solving (like jumping hoops to meet Apple Store regulations),

• stakeholder coordination (managing the logistics between international space agencies),

• project management (handling “no second chance” execution under the pressure of shifting launch windows),

and many more.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it actually takes to lead a project from a raw idea to the stars, this is the post for you.

Enjoy!

Cheers,
Tivadar

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The HUNOR (Hungarian To Orbit) national astronaut program was launched in 2021 to bring Hungary back into human spaceflight more than four decades after Bertalan Farkas became the first Hungarian in space. Its central goal was to send a Hungarian research astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) to carry out scientific experiments.

To reach the ISS, Hungary partnered with Axiom Space, joining the privately organized Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4), a roughly two-week Crew Dragon (Grace) flight commanded by veteran NASA astronaut legend Peggy Whitson and flown in international cooperation with the USA, Poland, and India.

Other crew members have been pilot Shubhanshu Shukla (India) and mission specialists Sławosz Uznánski-Wisniewski (Poland) and Tibor Kapu (Hungary).

HUNOR featured a dedicated open call for research ideas and experiments from Hungarian universities, companies, and research institutes. As a research fellow at the HUN-REN Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, this is how I got into the picture.

Phase 0 - Experiment idea