Space, the final frontier. And, if you ask Sean Hoenig ’14 MS’20, a potential new home for humanity.
At Advanced Space, Hoenig helps secure the government and commercial funding needed to advance space exploration — and, ultimately, space settlement. It’s a career he loves, even if it’s far removed from the one he initially imagined while earning his chemical engineering degree at Lehigh.
Discovering a Different Path
Like many students, Hoenig was eager to put his Lehigh education to work after graduation. For seven years, he worked as a research and development engineer focused on two-phase thermal management solutions.
During the pandemic, Hoenig made an unexpected career move. His growing interest in aerospace — and his experience leading a NASA Small Business Innovation Research project at a previous company — opened the door to an entirely new path.
“My research and development career combined being an engineer, program manager, and business capture professional all-in-one. We had to execute our research projects and write grant proposals to fund a small team,” Hoenig explains. “I lost a ton of proposals in my early career. I then learned that my differentiator was that I am an exceptional technical writer and I can synthesize complex ideas into winning solutions. Instead of being the ideas person, I focused on how to sell and write the stories that align with customer needs.”
These realizations led him to move to Colorado and join Advanced Space, an aerospace software and services company specializing in flight dynamics, spacecraft navigation, and software technologies that support future space exploration.
The Proposals Behind the Progress
Over the past four years, Hoenig has risen from proposal administrator to senior capture lead. Today, he identifies new opportunities, develops strategies, builds capture processes, and writes proposals that bring ambitious space missions and technologies to life.
Most recently, Hoenig supported Advanced Spaces’ funding and announcement of returning to the Moon with CAPSTONE 02: a two-spacecraft mission developed in partnership with NASA and Terran Orbital, a Lockheed Martin Company, as the satellite provider. The mission will explore how spacecraft automatically find, approach, and maneuver near each other in the space between the Earth and the Moon. CAPSTONE 02 will operate in this challenging environment to demonstrate, test, and refine technology and operations concepts needed to safely and efficiently conduct missions in support of Moon Base and future commercial activities. These critical technologies will help pave the way for sustained human exploration beyond Earth.
“We’re really interested in building solutions that will help humanity settle in space,” Hoenig says. “Aerospace technologies are the most extreme examples of human progress. The advances we’ve made, like autonomous navigation, would have been untested five or ten years ago. Supporting our technical teams on this cutting edge keeps me motivated.”
Although Hoenig’s career took an unexpected turn, his Lehigh education prepared him for the work he does today.
“A Lehigh education matters,” he says. “I remember sitting in my freshman English class thinking I didn’t really want to be there because I was so focused on learning my engineering curriculum. It ended up being the most memorable class I took. It strengthened my writing, taught me to think logically quickly, and played a huge role in shaping the capture professional I am today.”
Hoenig may not be designing spacecraft, but every proposal he writes helps move the next mission one step closer to launch. As humanity continues reaching farther into space, he’ll be helping make those journeys possible, one proposal at a time.
