Interview with Jennifer Barry – Young Woman Engineer of the Year

Q: When you were named Young Woman Engineer of the Year, what went through your mind? And what does the award mean to you now?

A: I thought I’d heard it wrong at first. I didn’t really fully believe it because all the finalists are such impressive women, and sitting with them and hearing about their journeys and their stories...It’s really hard to compare yourself to someone in a completely different sector. That’s why it’s so interesting being part of the IET, because it covers engineers across all sectors.

Q: The title comes with real visibility. How do you want to use this year and the platform that comes with it?

A: There are a few things which I’d like to try and promote this year. First, the space sector as a whole and why space is important to people. Everyone’s lives nowadays are touched by space, but I don’t think that message always gets across. People don’t always realise the impact space has on the general public. I’d also like to use the opportunity to talk about different types of underrepresentation. It’s really important to talk about women and girls, and that’s obviously the key message with this award, but there are other areas too, such as neurodivergence and Black and ethnic minority groups. Using this as a platform to promote wider discussion about what visibility means and the types of people that are engineers is so crucial.

Q: After this year, what would you like people to rethink about engineering as a career?

A: When I go out and talk to kids, they are normally under the impression that an engineer is either a man with a hard hat and a spanner, or someone in their 60s with white hair writing equations on a chalkboard. Those people might well be engineers, but there’s such a breadth of roles in the middle that we should talk about. For me, having a solid maths and physics base is important, but to be a good engineer is a lot more about working in a team, communicating effectively, and having those soft skills which we don’t always promote in the same way.

Q: For engineers outside the space sector, what might surprise them about modern satellite missions?

A: Probably the pace. From what I’ve seen, in four years you can go from contract to launch, which wasn’t really possible a couple of decades ago. Nowadays we’re using more commercial off-the-shelf equipment and reusing legacy components from other sectors like aviation. We’re finding ways to qualify subsystems more efficiently, and using analysis to back up testing. It’s all about building efficiently while maintaining that real safety-first focus.

Q: At what point did sustainability become a core part of your engineering work?

A: When I joined the UK Space Agency. In industry, sustainability can feel like a checkbox activity. When you join government, you start to see why certain decisions are made and understand the global impact those decisions can have. One of my first projects was the UK’s Active Debris Removal mission, focusing on capturing real pieces of debris, two defunct satellites, which was a first-of-its-kind. That’s when I really started to appreciate why this work matters and the challenges behind it. From there, I was invited to join a UN working group on long-term sustainability.

We launched a project I led to model the space environment and explore measures to monitor and protect it more effectively. That became a significant part of my role alongside other projects I was working on.

Q: Space debris can feel abstract. What problems is it already causing?

A: It’s similar to ocean pollution. One piece of plastic doesn’t make a difference. It’s the same with satellites in space. But decades of neglect mean congested orbits full of defunct satellites and small fragments that are hard to track and monitor. So, operating satellites need extra shielding and have to burn more propellant to avoid collisions. This shortens mission lifecycles and makes popular orbits harder to use. This has a knock-on effect for things like disaster monitoring, measuring climate change, GPS, internet, and weather forecasting.

Q: Is regulation keeping pace with rapid satellite launches?

A: I think it's a challenge and I think it's going to get even more challenging as we move forward. You see it with AI. There’s starting to be some regulation around AI and how we use it.

But the growth of that technology sector is so fast, it’s really hard to make decisions about how we want to use it as a country and understand what those decisions will mean long term. I think it’s similar in the space sector, where policy often feels a bit reactive, rather than being as future-thinking and forward-looking as we could be.

I remember there was a big debate when I was in government about how to balance creativity and growth in the sector with regulation. Basically trying not to over-regulate a growing industry while still maintaining our international commitments around space sustainability and safety. So there are a lot of different things we have to balance when it comes to policy decisions, funding decisions, and a whole range of other aspects.

Q: How would you explain systems engineering to someone who thinks space engineering is all hardware?

A: My favourite quote is that “systems engineering is weaponised common sense.” We make sure everything works together and systems talk to one another, hardware and software, and deliver a properly integrated piece. It’s a bit of a jack-of-all-trades role, making sure specialists are empowered to do their jobs and everything joins up at the end.

Q: What space-related challenges are approaching faster than people realise?

A: Space sustainability is the big one. Elon Musk has over 10,000 satellites in orbit now which changes the dynamics of how we interact with the space environment.

It has real positives, like bringing internet access to hard-to-reach areas, but it also brings challenges with how we use the environment. Every satellite launch has an environmental cost on Earth. From the rocket launch itself, and then when satellites re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere.

Another issue that’s starting to be discussed is the concept of dark and quiet skies. In the future, when you look up at the night sky, will you even know if you’re seeing a star or a satellite? We already have sky glow over cities, which makes it hard to see the stars, but for certain cultures and animals, being able to see the stars is essential for navigation or cultural reasons. I think we’ll start seeing impacts from that too.

And then there’s the question of orbital congestion. People might say we’re not overpopulated in orbit yet, but we could be approaching that within the next decade. That’s something we need to think about as a global population.