When you’re describing your work at the intersection of space exploration and artificial intelligence, the explanation inevitably gets too technical for someone in the conversation.
Unfazed, Hunter Sandidge ’15 pivots to more relatable terms: “OK, have you ever seen ‘Iron Man’? …”
Admittedly, Mr. Sandidge is a huge science-fiction fan who can pull from an extensive mental library of book and movie references. But Robert Downey Jr. didn’t teach him how to think on his feet and communicate with vastly different audiences. Carthage did.
Those are hallmarks of a broad-based education that has enabled Mr. Sandidge and the two fellow alumni he brought aboard at Collins Aerospace — Jackson Wehr ’18 and Jacob Werschey ’15 — to flourish in their groundbreaking work.
They’re using AI modeling to enhance life support systems on the International Space Station, assist mission control, and support other aspects of space exploration as NASA ramps up toward a return to human spaceflight.
This feature story first appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of The Carthaginian magazine.
The first of the three Carthaginians to be hired at Collins, Mr. Sandidge started there in 2016. About 18 months ago, he moved over to his current role as manager of data science and artificial intelligence engineering.
Maybe that isn’t where Mr. Sandidge envisioned degrees in finance from Carthage (bachelor’s) and DePaul University (master’s) leading him, but he’s ecstatic to be there.
“Every day, we sit on the knife’s edge between sci-fi and reality,” he says, “and we’re continually moving that line.”
Thinking like a professional trader still comes in handy at unexpected times. Like when you need an algorithm that can automatically maintain a stable temperature in a spacesuit — and other approaches have led to dead ends.
“Instead, I treated the temperature in the suit like a stock price,” Mr. Sandidge explains. “It worked remarkably well.”
That’s just one of many useful tools available in a toolbox he started filling at Carthage. While some schools churn out students like hammers that are equipped to do a single task, Mr. Sandidge views himself as “more of a utility knife.”
The Insider
Knowing “the quality of graduate Carthage produces,” Mr. Sandidge recruited Jackson Wehr ’18 for an internship shortly after the 2018 alumnus became available.
Of the three teammates, Mr. Wehr took the straightest route into an aerospace career. He majored in physics and was heavily involved in the College’s microgravity research with NASA, flying in zero-gravity to test fuel-gauging technology that’s now under consideration for future space missions.
More than anything, space has the coolness factor going for it. For Mr. Wehr, who’s now a full-time senior data scientist at Collins, the reality of that career path has lived up to the billing.
Cognizant of the rare opportunity he has to stretch the limits of modern technology, he’s grateful that Carthage gave him the latitude to sharpen his problem-solving skills, take on unfamiliar challenges, and even speak in public.
At one professional conference where other deep-in-the-weeds presentations elicited yawns, a faculty member noticed that Mr. Wehr could hold an audience’s attention.
The key? Pretend you’re talking to Grandma.
“Not everyone is technically inclined,” he adds. “People skills take you a lot farther than anyone gives you credit for.”
Hunter Sandidge ’15 at the entrance to a Collins Aerospace facility in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.
The Translator
Surprisingly, when these space-tech professionals reminisce about their favorite Carthage classes, they bring up foundational ones in philosophy, religion, and literature first. That might explain why the silly memes that Jacob Werschey ’15 shares are based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Mr. Werschey and the guy who now supervises him, Mr. Sandidge, have been buddies since freshman orientation, when they bonded over facial hair fails. Colleagues, though? For a long time, that seemed unlikely.
Mr. Werschey went all-in on a Japanese major, provided translation and cross-cultural programming in northern Japan for two years after graduation, and then continued his bilingual work at Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu.
Then came a COVID-induced career shift. The adaptable alumnus already had one foot in the analytical world by the time Mr. Sandidge brought him aboard as a data engineer for Collins in 2023.
In a way, Mr. Werschey has simply moved on to a different language — interpreting databases coded in SQL rather than documents written in Japanese. Human or machine, each language has its own distinct patterns.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking at half the time, and that’s the beauty of it,” he says.
The Future
Though all three of them work remotely — Mr. Werschey from Cincinnati, the other two from northern Illinois — camaraderie remains strong, in part because they share a common background as Carthaginians. While they can’t divulge the details of their AI usage, these three alumni laugh off the apocalyptic predictions that some observers have made about the emerging technology.
Mr. Sandidge sees this no differently from the introduction of the calculator. By programming machines to do the repetitive tasks they do best, he explains, we can allow workers to focus on the “uniquely human skills” only they can provide.
While monitoring the International Space Station, one of the team’s goals is to predict when a part’s going to wear out. After all, astronauts can’t just head over to the hardware store for an instant replacement. It can take months or longer to build the part and schedule a launch.
It would take someone with unlimited time and attention span to sift through the mountain of data that’s automatically sent back from orbit. So the data crew is trying to build an anomaly detection model that doesn’t mind doing the gruntwork.
So, if the question is whether the end of human employment is just around the corner, even the avowed sci-fi nerd thinks it’s too outlandish to consider right now. Mr. Sandidge has a more important takeaway.
“People who use AI will replace people who don’t.”
Hunter Sandidge ’15 (left) and Jackson Wehr ’18 (right).
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