Thermal Design Scientist/Engineer

About Manastu

Manastu Space is a Space Safety and Logistics company focused on making space safe, sustainable, and accessible. We develop technologies to address critical challenges such as space debris mitigation and green propulsion, enabling safer satellite operations, and long-term sustainability of the space ecosystem.

Our work sits at the intersection of advanced engineering, applied research, and mission-critical systems, requiring deep technical capability and long-term thinking.

Website: https://www.manastuspace.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manastu-space/

Email: [email protected]

Role Objective

In a green monopropellant propulsion system, temperature decides whether it starts on time, how long it can fire, and whether the propellant stays secure. This role owns the thermal design of our propulsion systems — thruster, valves, feed lines and propellant tank — from thermal requirements to flight-qualified hardware.

The role covers thermal design end to end: deriving thermal requirements and heat-load budgets; specifying the catalyst-bed heater and developing preheat profiles; protecting the thruster during firing and minimizing soak-back after shutdown; keeping the propellant tank within its operating temperatures with passive and active thermal control; and proving every prediction against hot-fire and thermal-vacuum testing.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Thermal Design Scientist/Engineer to join our growing aerospace facility in Navi Mumbai, with strong fundamentals in heat transfer and hands-on experience in the thermal design, analysis and testing of space or high-temperature hardware.

Manastu's propulsion systems are moving from development to flight-qualified production, and this is a foundational role: you will set the thermal analysis standard and margin policy the company designs to and take the thermal design through qualification. As its founding member, you will work hands-on across requirements, analysis, hardware and test, and build the thermal team.

You will work closely with propulsion, mechanical,



avionics and systems engineers — turning thermal analysis into the heater, insulation and mounting decisions they implement, and designing to the interface temperatures and environments set for each spacecraft.

Key Responsibilities

- Derive the propulsion system's thermal requirements — temperature limits for the heater, chamber and nozzle materials, valve seats and seals, and the propellant — build the heat-load budget from internal and external sources with hot and cold cases and margins (ECSS-E-ST-31 or equivalent), and own the thermal interface control document (ICD) with the host spacecraft.
- Specify the thruster's catalyst-bed heater from detailed calculation — power, resistance across the supply-voltage range, maximum element temperature, redundancy and mounting — review supplier data against it, and develop preheat profiles and time to temperature for each operating mode.
- Protect the thruster during firing and after shutdown — keep the heater, chamber and nozzle materials within their limits, set firing-duration, duty-cycle and over-temperature limits, and minimise soak-back into the valve, injector, mounts and spacecraft with isolators, standoffs, radiation shields and coatings.
- Design the propellant tank's thermal control — passive (multi-layer insulation (MLI), optical solar reflectors (OSRs), thermal straps, heat pipes, radiators) and active (heaters, thermoelectric modules) — then specify, build and qualify the thermal hardware with suppliers.
- Run the analysis yourself — hand calculations first, then transient thermal models in Thermal Desktop/SINDA-FLUINT, ESATAN-TMS, NX Space Systems Thermal, Ansys or COMSOL — including convective heat transfer on the hot-gas side and in propellant flow, using correlations, conjugate heat transfer (CHT)



or computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
- Define and run thermal tests — thermal-vacuum (TVAC), thermal-balance and hot-fire thermal instrumentation — correlate your models to test, and support integration and in-orbit operations.
- Keep the propellant and hardware within safe temperature limits, write the company's thermal analysis standard and margin policy, and present the thermal design at design reviews.
- Mentor engineers and help build the thermal team.

Experience & Background

- Master Degree in mechanical, aerospace or thermal engineering, with 5–10 years in the thermal design and analysis of spacecraft, propulsion or other high-temperature hardware.
- Taken at least one thermal design from requirements to tested hardware.
- Hands-on, not delegated: transient heat-transfer analysis with hand calculations — conduction, radiation and convection; thermal models in Thermal Desktop/SINDA-FLUINT, ESATAN-TMS, NX Space Systems Thermal, Ansys or COMSOL; scripting in Python or MATLAB; working knowledge of 3-D CAD (SolidWorks or similar).
- Thermal requirements and heat-load budgets — temperature limits, internal and external heat loads, hot and cold cases, and margins.
- Thermal control hardware sized and specified — heaters and sensors, MLI, coatings, thermal straps, heat pipes, radiators, interface materials or thermoelectric modules.
- Thermal testing — defined or supported thermal-vacuum, thermal-balance or hot-fire thermal tests, reduced the data and correlated models to test.
- Convective heat transfer — heat-transfer coefficients from correlations, CHT or CFD (Fluent, STAR-CCM+ or Icepak), and knowing where convection does not apply.
- Mentored, led or helped build a team of engineers.
- Preference for candidates who have designed, built and tested thermal control hardware — heaters, MLI, heat pipes, thermal straps, radiators or thermoelectric modules.

What we offer

- Comprehensive health insurance
- High ownership and visibility, with direct access to leadership
- Support for learning, conferences, and research exposure
- Subsidized lunch plan

📌 Thermal Design Scientist/Engineer (Navi Mumbai)
🏢 Manastu Space
📍 Navi Mumbai