Understand the challenge
Make the problem understandable without losing the people, incentives, and institutions around it.
Every system feeds the next.
Better systemsfor a sharedfuture.
I build open systems for shared infrastructure: orbital debris, farm energy, space regulation. Each project ships with its code, its tests, and a label on every number that says whether it is a model, a simulation or a measurement.
01 / Mind
It starts as an idea, and every idea is a system.
New capabilities create new choices. Good intentions alone do not decide who benefits, who bears risk, or who gets a voice. Before anything is built, I try to make those choices visible.
Test the idea
Ask how a proposal might work, where it could fail, and what safeguards would make it more credible.
Make it accountable
Give affected people a voice, explain decisions, and create ways to question or correct them.
02 / Cosmos
Then it meets the sky we share.
Objects left in orbit can stay there for decades, and each one adds risk for whoever flies next. The paper I co-authored asks what would change if reducing that risk could be rewarded, voluntarily, instead of left to the next operator.
Research · Conference paper
Space Debris Credits
A proposed way to encourage better environmental stewardship in orbit through voluntary participation and market incentives.
- Format
- Conference paper and presentation
- Contributors
- Maxime Kadri & Anna Shishkina
- Presented
- 19 February 2026 · UT Austin
- Focus
- Orbital stewardship and incentives
18,036intact objects in low Earth orbit, ranked
46%of the risk measure among derelicts sits in 50 objects
≈80×the reduction from removing the top ten, versus ten at random
Illustrative research estimates from the follow-up working paper. No official rating or credit exists.
Three open projects. Each one runs, and each can be checked.
The code is public under open licences, every number says whether it is a model, a simulation or a measurement, and the test suites are in the repositories. Start with whichever project matches your question.
SDC and SDER
Scores a mission's orbital debris exposure with its uncertainty shown, and ranks real catalogue objects by risk.
Compost Energy
Open hardware that recovers heat from farm compost, with an energy model, CAD model and a physics simulation.
ComplianceOS
Plans the licences, authorisations and ITU filings a satellite mission needs, with each requirement cited to its law.
Claim to evidence
Each headline figure, the label it carries, and the code it comes from. MODEL means computed from stated assumptions. None of these is a measurement from a built system yet.
- Intact objects in low Earth orbit, ranked by risk
- 18,036MODELsdc-sder repository
- Share of the derelict risk measure held by 50 objects
- 46%MODELsdc-sder repository
- Farm-scale heat recovery, mean over the heating season
- 548 kWMODELindustrial model
Parity: the in-browser lab reproduces the Python reference on more than 200 fixtures, checked by npm run test:lab. All repositories on GitHub
03 / Planet
Everything we launch lands somewhere.
Powerful systems should answer to the people they affect.
Progress should be measured by more than what can be built. It matters who can participate, who is protected, and whether decisions can be examined and improved.
Explore the principles04 / Soil
What we leave behind feeds what comes next.
Stewardship is slow work. It asks what a system leaves for the people who come after it: what it uses up, what it repairs, and who is left to tend it.
05 / And the loop closes
Every new idea grows from what came before.