Profile: Suellen Eslinger

Well Grounded

by Donna J. Born

Suellen Eslinger has led a distinguished career as a distinguished engineer. Above all, she has a soft spot for software, the kind that empowers massive ground systems.

Suellen Eslinger, distinguished engineer.

Suellen Eslinger's work as a software engineer at Aerospace primarily focuses on large ground systems, although during her long and immensely productive career she has worked with onboard software, done research in software acquisition and processes, developed and taught courses in software acquisition and engineering, and published and presented numerous papers, among other projects. She is a woman of many talents and a wide range of interests, from a love of mathematics to a passion for playing the recorder. The importance of her work has been recognized by almost every achievement award Aerospace gives.

By the time Eslinger came to Aerospace in 1985, she was already experienced in large ground systems, having worked extensively on systems for the Naval Research Laboratory, General Research Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. She had managed software development projects for several systems, including a system for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory to evaluate the performance of the Trident submarine and missiles; a ground-based attitude control system for the NASA Earth Radiation Budget Satellite; and the Network Control Center, a large ground system for the NASA Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System.

"I've worked on large ground systems for most of my career. I would expect most people in software to have that experience because this is where the largest software is," Eslinger said."My very first assignment here at Aerospace was helping to get CSOC, which was part of the Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN), up and running. Lots and lots of software." CSOC, or the Consolidated Space Operations Center, was the huge ground system the Air Force was developing at the time in Colorado Springs. Eslinger led several teams of young engineers working on various parts of the system.

When that project was well on its way, she moved to the AFSCN program office as section manager for Data-Systems Modernization, which became the command and control segment. She also worked on the software control system for large digital switches going into the communication segment.

"The control system for those digital switches was essential for us to get the switches into the AFSCN and CSOC because the control systems that were in the switches themselves were very rudimentary. You couldn't handle a mission using those. The communication segment up at Sunnyvale had no switching system, and we were trying to put the first switching system in. It took years. So that was kind of my love—I got very involved in that project," Eslinger said.

The Air Force Satellite Control and Data Handling Program Office gave her an award in January 1991 for her work on the switching system."I got a lovely plaque from the Air Force that no one else had gotten. I was really pleased with this because it was very unusual for the Air Force to give such an award to Aerospace." The plaque reads:"Presented to Suellen Eslinger in earnest appreciation for ad infinitum dedication and contributions without equal." She also later received an Aerospace Group Achievement Award for contributions to the development of AFSCN communication switching systems.

Eslinger had long been interested in research, and when a staff position in the area of software risk analysis opened, she readily accepted it because it offered funding for research. Before she came to Aerospace, her work on the Software Engineering Laboratory, a large research project at NASA Goddard to improve software development, inspired her interest in software processes and metrics. This eventually became her specialty at Aerospace.

"I still do a lot of ground systems, but I've transitioned from the actual development of ground systems to what you might call the process arena. Not what do you build, but how do you build it? And how do you build it in a better way?" she explained. She is coauthor with Richard Adams of an article in this issue of Crosslink about commercial off-the-shelf software in ground systems for satellites. Their research identified a set of best practices for using such software, from both contractor and government viewpoints.

Eslinger was principal investigator on three independent research and development projects for nine years. Her first IR&D grant—looking at techniques for evaluating risk in software on a program—was also the first funding granted to the software engineering subdivision to do research related to software processes. A second grant looked at software acquisition processes:"What should the government be doing to do their job better in acquiring software-intensive systems?" A third project developed a technique for Aerospace to go into a program and do a quick risk assessment.

When that work was completed, she became principal investigator of the software-acquisition Mission Oriented Investigation and Experimentation research task and continues in that role after more than eight years with the project."We merged small research efforts in software acquisition into a larger software acquisition research task. That funding is marvelous. It has enabled us to do so much that can benefit multiple programs. I like doing the research, and that's been one area that I've found very interesting, very challenging," Eslinger said.

Software is where the future of space systems lies, Eslinger believes."We are building a distributed processing system in space that happens to live in satellites. The fact that it's doing communication and has communication hardware and some of it lives on satellites is not where that whole frontier is. That whole frontier is in its software on board and on the ground—an enormous quantity of software. We're looking at going from zero lines of code in the first Defense Support Program satellite in the late '60s to 500,000 to a million lines of code onboard our satellites. A million lines of code used to be a lot on the ground—our ground systems are now up to 8 to 10 million lines of code.

"What we have in space is an information technology revolution," she added."A collection of satellites, a constellation, has to be viewed as an information technology system because it's no longer the hardware that's as difficult as the software. The software is what does the mission these days. Without the software the hardware would be meaningless. So the new frontier for satellites is in their software. And the ground systems are a huge part of that—just a huge part of that. Satellites can't live without their ground systems."

Unfortunately, Eslinger said, software is also where the trouble is:"The software is just a terrible problem everywhere on all our programs. It's over budget; it's over schedule. The software has thousands and thousands of defects in it. It doesn't work right. It doesn't do what it's supposed to. Sometimes it takes years to get the software beaten to shape so it can go into operations." One of her goals in her remaining work years is to do something that leaves the industry better than when she came:"What could we do that would be new and exciting and really make some kind of big impact?"

Teaching is another area of Eslinger's experience, which she called upon to help The Aerospace Institute develop the systems engineering curriculum as it was forming in the mid-1990s. She had taught mathematics while working on her master's degree at the University of Arizona and her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland. She also taught in all areas of the mathematics curriculum at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and at Goucher College, her undergraduate alma mater.

The Institute's software specialist and consultant, she worked on the core program design and the four courses of the systems engineering program, incorporating software modules. She continues to work on recent course additions, such as software acquisition and engineering, space system test management, and risk management."Curriculum development never ends. I like it and it's exciting," she said.

She started teaching in the Institute's systems engineering curriculum the first time it was given and still teaches in different areas of the curriculum. She is a great favorite of the students, and the Institute has given her five annual Institute Achievement Awards in recognition for her strategic contributions.

In 1997, Eslinger was appointed a distinguished engineer, joining an elite group of Aerospace technical staff who lead major efforts and act as consultants in different areas."I lead research projects," she explained."I lead the Institute work. I was a leader for the Mission Assurance Improvement Task Force of the Space and Missile Systems Center and the National Reconnaissance Office—I led the software Integrated Product Team for that."

She is the first and only woman to be a distinguished engineer at Aerospace."I think women who are qualified to be distinguished engineers are going up the management chain instead," she said."Many of our really bright, really capable, really distinguished woman engineer material are now level-4 and level-5 managers. I didn't want to go up the management chain; I like to stay technical. I like to lead technical teams."

Elected an Aerospace Woman of the Year in 2000, Eslinger was cited by the committee for her technical achievements as well as her support for women in the profession:"Her technical excellence and professional achievements have made Eslinger a role model for women in the aerospace industry. She finds time for technical and career counseling, serving as a mentor for young women engineers." Women have been a powerful force in her own life and career, especially her mother, who she says is her hero:"I'm where I am because of my mother's goals for me and her ideals."

Another important influence in her early life was Sputnik, which went up when she was in junior high. Americans were stunned by the Soviet Union's technical prowess, and like schools all over the country, Baltimore shored up its mathematics and science programs. Always good in mathematics, she made an easy decision to take advantage of the new programs. In high school, she focused on academics to the exclusion of everything else:"I spent my whole time studying. I took my SATs and got a full tuition scholarship to Goucher College, a women's college in Baltimore. That was just a marvelous education." She earned a B.A. in mathematics (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) at 19 and was awarded the Torrey prize, given to senior majors in mathematics who are selected by the department for their excellent records and firm grasp of the subject.

"Education in math and sciences and engineering is really, really important," she tells young people, but she also tells them to get a strong foundation in the liberal arts. At Goucher, she majored in mathematics and science, but says it was her liberal arts education that taught her to think, to write, to speak—"what we do here at Aerospace. We do technical analysis, but we have to communicate. Even as a math and science major, I wrote research papers constantly. So writing a technical report here is not a big deal—it is not a stretch."

"Engineering is a wonderful field to be in," she added."It's interesting, exciting, there are good jobs, well paying jobs. Engineering requires a lot of thought, a lot of study, but to be successful, you have to be willing to step up and communicate your results. You have to take on assignments where you will be talking to people, briefing people, proselytizing your viewpoints, and writing them down. You must be willing to take your love of engineering in your hand and go out with that. If you want to achieve at Aerospace—whether you want to achieve technically or in management—you need to do that. You have to be willing to accept assignments where you will have to brief people way above your level and not be afraid to stand up and say: 'This is what it is.' "

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