Work

Buoyant

From September of 2021 through Jan of 2023, I started and ran a drone startup. I built blimps in my garage, recruited Ben Claman as a cofounder, built and flew four prototypes, and raised a multi-million-dollar seed round. Tech Crunch Article

Astranis

From July of 2019 to September of 2021 I was a systems and test engineer at Astranis. Astranis builds and operates geostationary communication satellites that are smaller and cheaper than existing geo satellites. As a systems engineer, I did groundwork for spacecraft operations and maintained several systems engineering products. I wrote procedures for spacecraft startup after separation from the rocket, vehicle checkout, radio redundancy. I defined spacecraft failure modes, maintained the satellite’s power budget, and wrote the company’s first Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA).As a test engineer, I conducted environmental test campaigns for power and radio components. I wrote test procedures, arranged logistics, and operated components through testing. I was an operator of the qualification spacecraft through its first TVAC test, the first spacecraft-level test of Astranis’s technology.

OneWeb

From 2017 to 2019 I was a simulation engineer at OneWeb. OneWeb builds and operates a low-earth-orbit satellite broadband constellation, similar to Starlink. The system is quite complex, so my team wrote simulations to understand it better.

I tools in python modeling the power and thermal subsystems of the spacecraft. I eventually productionized that model and implemented in OneWeb’s fleet operations software, where it was used to prevent over-discharging the vehicle’s batteries. I also wrote a model of OneWeb’s geographic demand distribution to map out data usage and predict user experiences. I used that model to prepare products we presented to customers, most notably, the technical products that lead to OneWeb’s second commercial agreement with MicroCom, an Alaskan ISP.

I also had the privilege of being on-console as a systems engineering liason during OneWeb’s first launch in February 2019. I got to observe as we repeatedly failed to make first contact with the spacecraft, worked through about a dozen communication system bugs (some our fault, some not), and finally commissioned and orbit-raised the spacecraft.

JPL

I spent two summers interning in the Mars Program Office as a systems engineer, on a six-person formulation team for the Next Mars Orbiter. That spacecraft is one of three used in NASA’s Mars Sample Return program. 7 years later, it seems like that mission will probably fly this decade - that’s the good and the bad parts of working at NASA. I wrote MATLAB parametric simulation tools to design the orbiter, and a sensor package to find and grab the sample container out of Mars orbit, among other things. One particularly fun analysis was to calculate how long the sample container would stay in Mars orbit - we were aiming for 100 years.

Research

Beaver Signal

I built a beacon that a spacecraft could use to find a laser communication ground station from space, working at Kerri Cahoy’s STAR Lab. We took the beacon out to a field in the middle of one night in May, and the Aerospace Corporation took pictures of it with a satellite, AeroCube-5. We took 5 pictures, and detected the beacon unambiguously. The project demonstrated a low-cost technology that can be used to allow a satellite to find a laser-communication ground station. I wrote up the project and published it as first-author in a paper in the Journal of Small Satellites.

DeMi

At STAR Lab I also worked on the Deformable Mirror (DeMi) mission at STAR Lab. DeMi was a 3U cubesat that demonstrated the operation of a deformable mirror in space. Deformable mirrors are a sort of mirror that changes shape. They’re widely used in astronomy on the ground, and DeMi demonstrated the same technology in space. I designed parts of the DeMi spacecraft’s power system and prepared systems engineering products. I was an author on a paperabout the spacecraft, Design of the deformable mirror demonstration CubeSat: DeMi

Electromagnetic Detumbling

I did my senior thesis on tractor beams. A partner and I demonstrated a technique that could be used by a debris removal spacecraft to stop the spin of orbital debris without touching it. A magnetic field around a moving conductive object exerts a sort of electromagnetic drag on that object (technical name: eddy current torque). We demonstrated this effect in a lab by spinning an aluminum cylinder on a frictionless bearing and generating a magnetic field around it, bringing the cylinder to rest. I wrote a paper on this work and presented it at the 2018 IAA Conference on Space Situational Awareness.

Undergrad Projects

Some other things I worked on at school.

433 Eros: Observational Astronomy

I took pictures of the near-earth-asteroid 433 Eros over several cold Wednesday nights in 2016. Using these I calculated Eros’s rotational period (how long an Eros “day” is). The correct answer is 5 hours, 16 minutes, and 13.4 seconds, and I was off by 3.6 seconds. Eros features in the TV show The Expanse and the book it was based on, Leviathan Wakes, where it is colony that is attacked by vomit zombies, and then crashes into Venus.

Apophis Mission

My senior capstone class designed a mission to rendezvous with the asteroid 99942 Apophis. Apophis is a near-earth-asteroid that will make a close flyby of earth, within the geosynchronous belt, in 2029. Our proposed spacecraft would rendezvous with Apophis, follow it through the close approach, observe the effect of Earth’s gravity on it, and deduce things about its internal structure.

Rocket Team

I was on MIT’s rocket team. While I was there we built a rocket called Project Odyssey. In the summer of 2015 we drove out in to the Utah desert and launched in the IREC 2015 challenge, winning first place in the basic category. I was on the recovery subteam, designing the payload bay and running recovery tests. Here’s a hype video.

SPHERES

Freshman summer I was a research assistant on the SPHERES experiment. I wrote procedures to assemble a structural attachment and a docking port, which were used to test guidance algorithms for spacecraft docking. I think my procedures were used when HALO and UDP were assembled on the international space station, though I’m not sure. I also made a new website for the SPHERES project by manually writing it in HTML, which I was very proud of at the time. It has since been replaced by a much shorter page about SPHERES.