Alumni Spotlight: Alex Zannos '11

High Voltage Career

As an electrical engineer, Alex Zannos ’11 is breaking ground for women and also helping to propel satellites into outer space.

By Jana F. Brown

Last summer, when Astra Space announced the successful ignition of its electric propulsion thruster on board the Spaceflight Sherpa-LTE1 orbital transfer vehicle (OTV), the milestone came with a Berwick Academy connection.

That’s because Alex Zannos ’11 is an electrical engineer at Astra who worked with a 15-person team to make the soda-can-sized thruster operational. The thruster itself is a small engine that uses electric propulsion to transport a satellite in space. An added note is that the Sherpa-LTE1 with the Astra thruster is the first fully functional electric propulsion OTV.

“The Spaceflight LTE mission was our first thruster in space,” says Zannos, who has been with Astra for almost three years. “It went into orbit last year and it has been working up in space ever since. I worked on the electronics that control the thruster system.”

The thruster system, Zannos explains, is the element that creates the propulsion for the satellite, and the propulsion then creates the thrust required for the satellite to move. The system is composed of three main parts — the thruster, which is the actual engine; the electronics that run the thruster; and the feed system, which controls the fuel. All three must work in tandem for the system to operate properly.

“How electric propulsion works is you apply different high voltages at different points and then you flow the propellant, which is the gas, and using both the particles and the high voltage, a plasma forms between the high voltage nodes. What I work on is the part that creates the high voltage and is also the brain of the system.”

 In addition to breaking new ground in space, Zannos is helping to break the glass ceiling for women in STEM fields. She is one of only four women — and the only female engineer — on the 15-person thruster system team at Astra.

“The field is pretty dominated by men, which is unfortunate,” Zannos says. “It’s definitely palpable. But I came into this field because I really like solving interesting problems, and it’s fun to be able to do that every day.”

Zannos’ extensive knowledge comes by way of her education at Berwick and Stanford. She arrived on the Hilltop as a ninth grader and took on the demanding curriculum, particularly enjoying high-level calculus and physics classes. 

“The academics at Berwick were super rigorous,” she says. “It felt like every teacher cared about what they taught — and cared about every student.”

Zannos went on to major in physics at Stanford, where she also minored in computer science, before earning her master’s in electrical engineering from the University. She was attracted to the field because of the opportunities it presented to work on projects with tangible, hands-on results and a fairly rapid timetable. In graduate school, Zannos completed an internship in power electronics at Tesla, where she first had a chance to apply her education to finding real-world solutions. She got another opportunity while preparing the electronics system for Spaceflight. After a detailed research and development phase, the Astra thruster was in space six months later.

“It was a little intense,” Zannos says, “but really exciting to see.” The next step for Zannos and her Astra team is building and delivering thrusters for additional satellites.