Thales - designing PCDU for the Lunar View module
The Client
Thales Alenia Space has been a leading global space manufacturer for more than 40 years, delivering high-tech solutions for telecommunications, navigation, Earth observation, environmental management, exploration, science, and orbital infrastructures. Thanks to its diversity of skills, talents, and cultures, Thales Alenia Space enables customers (including governments, institutions, space agencies, and telecommunications operators) to connect, secure and defend, observe and protect, explore, travel, and navigate in space.
The Added value of our Consultant Gilles
Gilles joined Verotech at the end of 2022 and started working at Thales Alenia Space Belgium (TAS-B) in their Leuven site, in the same city where he graduated from university just months before.
He joined TAS-B as an engineer in the ‘microsolutions’ team. The goal was to qualify some of the in house ASIC’s so that they can be used in their space equipment. This qualification ensures that the ASIC’s are robust against the brutal space environment. This means (amongst others) setting up and performing radiation tests.
Since the spring of 2025, Gilles also started working on a part of the electronic design of the PCDU (power control & distribution unit) for the Lunar View module for the lunar Gateway. The PCDU will control, protect and connect different power busses of the Gateway as part of this Lunar View module (previously known as ESPRIT Refuelling Module: ERM). The PCDU will be present in the inhabited zone of the Gateway and is serviceable by the astronauts. The design is challenging due to the many strict requirements coming from ESA & NASA, while also designing something that can be used later on in the product line of TAS-B.
