Caltech Space Challenge 2026 — Team Voyager

In March 2026 (22–27) I took part in the Caltech Space Challenge, a week-long international mission-design competition: 32 participants selected from more than 500 applicants. With Team Voyager we designed an opportunistic interplanetary mission that flies by comet P/2005 T4 (SWAN) and then enters orbit around Venus, to study volatiles and atmospheric loss. Our team won the Challenge.

I designed the communications and electrical power systems. It showed me how much clearly communicating and negotiating requirements between subsystems matters, and how many iterations a cohesive design needs, even in a fast, informal concurrent-design setting. Systems engineering principles inevitably surface, and there is no way around them for success.

Above all, it reminded me how much fun technical work is among passionate, cheerful and driven people. Team Voyager: Charlie Aveline, Nadine Barth, Alessandro Beolchi, Daniel Betco, Ashwin Bhat, Amelia Brumfield, Laura Daumerie, Ethan Foss, Mennatallah Hussein, Mariam Naseem, Giulio Orlando (my partner in communications design), Adrienne Rudolph, Filipe Senra, Matthew Werneken, Clark Zhang and me. Thanks to the organisers Federico Benazzo and Jennifer Berry and the Keck Institute for Space Studies, to our mentors (especially Nigel Angold), and to the speakers from NASA JPL, Rocket Lab, SpaceX and beyond.

Our final presentation is on YouTube.