Student spotlight: Pierre from the Master Finance and Strategy

COULD YOU TALK US THROUGH YOUR BACKGROUND AND YOUR PASSION FOR AEROSPACE?

My name is Pierre Letellier, I come from the city of Tours. I am a first-year student in the Master Finance and Strategy at the School of Management and Impact. In high school, I found a passion for aerospace, in all its political, historical, and technical dimensions. I obtained a Baccalauréat in Science, specialized in mathematics, and was accepted in a classe préparatoire at The Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon (INSA Lyon).

As I wanted to go to the ISAE-SUPAERO, I had initially decided to do a classe préparatoire, but I was pleasantly surprised to be accepted at Sciences Po!

I then discovered that I could do a double degree with ISAE-SUPAERO. From then on, I set myself the goal of proving my passion for aerospace through experience rather than through academic training.

HOW DO YOU CONNECT YOUR PASSION WITH YOUR STUDIES?

I started to work at the Centre Spatial Universitaire Grenoblois (CSUG) along with my Bachelor's degree. Having only theoretical knowledge in economics, I undertook to study and to model the question of space debris with the multidisciplinary glance of a Sciencespiste. The internship report was kept by the CSUG as it is confidential.

Mrs. Stéphanie Lizy-Destrez, professor-researcher at ISAE-SUPAERO, found me by chance on Twitter where I was talking about my work. Shortly after taking the good news, I did my second research internship at DCAS, the engineering school's laboratory. This “hybrid” internship’s goal was to study the viability of a satellite project, the "Recycler". The satellite should provide a second life to space debris in geostationary orbit (GEO). It can also generate a profit, by offering services in orbit. My research on the subject, deliberately techno-economic, was peer reviewed before being published in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica.

WHY DID YOU CHOSE THE MASTER FINANCE & STRATEGY OVER DOING REASERCH?

Since my academic exchange at UC Berkeley in 3rd year of my Bachelor's degree, I spent most of my time working with American startups from New Space. Among them was Skyloom, which designs a laser communication technology between satellites.

During the presentation of my research at the International Aeronautics Congress (IAC), I got the business cards of French New Space companies. All these experiences and projects reflect the reality that I have never felt comfortable being only a student in Human Sciences.

To build bridges between disciplines, between sectors, you often have to step out of the classroom. Aerospace is precisely one of these cross-disciplinary fields that calls for the connection of "Human" and "Hard" sciences.

It is especially by entering the Finance and Strategy Master's program that I was able to begin my transition to the business world. Today, I am preparing my application for the double degree with ISAE-SUPAERO. It is time to reconnect with my main disciplines: economics, strategy, engineering.

WHAT LESSONS HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES?

I will conclude with a lesson learned from my internship. I was supposed to identify the economic constraints that the satellite had to overcome to generate a profit, but the analysis itself could not be done without a prior engineering documentation. I learned that the Industrial innovation works by going back and forth between economic and technical analysis: one needs the other to progress intelligently.