// SPACECRAFT GNC ENGINEER
Spacecraft GNC Engineer II at Varda Space Industries in Los Angeles, and an M.S. Computer Science student at Georgia Tech specializing in AI. I fly spacecraft, return them to Earth, and build the autonomy that makes both routine.
SAADAT, ATILLA VARDA SPACE INDUSTRIES · LOS ANGELES, CA
// MISSION LOG
Spacecraft GNC Engineer II at Varda, covering Monte Carlo simulation, trajectory design, and on-orbit operations for the W-Series reentry vehicles that bring in-space manufacturing back to Earth.
★ Successfully reentered W-Series 4 and W-Series 5 ↗Placed 4th in the MIT ARCLab STORM-AI competition: real-time thermospheric density forecasting for LEO spacecraft with a BiGRU-attention network.
★ 4th place: MIT ARCLab STORM-AI Challenge ↗GNC Engineer for the Droid.001 and Droid.002 satellite missions: autonomous mission ops and attitude control optimization for in-situ Non-Earth Imaging (NEI).
MASc. Thesis, Chapter 1: Optimizing Attitude Determination & Control System (ADCS) testing for nanosatellite development.
MASc. Thesis, Chapter 2: Estimating spacecraft inertia tensors on-orbit from attitude telemetry.
★ Selected by the Canadian Space Agency as a Canadian Delegate to IAC 2022 ↗MASc. Thesis, Chapter 3: Attitude determination with self-inspection cameras repurposed as Earth horizon sensors.
★ 1st place: SmallSat 2022 Frank J. Redd Student Competition ↗
MASc. Thesis, Chapter 4: Automated spacecraft solar power generation analysis for NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's StarBurst spacecraft.
★ Conducted for NASA Marshall Space Flight Center's StarBurst spacecraft
Founder, President, and Lead Systems Engineer of WinSAT: a 3U LEO Earth-observation CubeSat.
★ 1st place: Canadian Satellite Design Challenge (CSDC-5) Critical Design Review ↗
Satellite ADCS fault detection and isolation using ensemble machine learning techniques.
★ Published in the Aerospace Systems journal ↗
Aerodynamics data acquisition module for the UWindsor Rocketry Team: undergraduate avionics engineering project.
Globally optimized naval routes in the North Arctic Ocean from Earth observation data: undergraduate research project.
Dynamics identification for industrial robotics: robotics systems engineering internship at Mujin Inc., Tokyo, Japan.
Demonstration inertial electrostatic confinement nuclear fusion reactor: undergraduate nuclear engineering research project.
// ON ORBIT
// RECOGNITION
Oct 2024
Recognized by Payload’s “30 under 30” for achievements across the space industry, including innovation, advocacy, and leadership.
Sep 2024
Awarded SSPI’s “20 Under 35” recognition for exceptional leadership, innovation, and contributions to the space and satellite industry.
Aug 2022
Awarded 1st place ($10,000) for Best Paper and Presentation at the Small Satellite Conference Frank J. Redd Student Competition.
May 2019
Awarded $2,500 for outstanding work and leadership in Aerospace Engineering.
Jan 2019
Awarded $1,500 to attend the ESA Atlantic from Space Workshop to present CryoRoute.
Mar 2017
Awarded $4,000 to attend the ESA North-American CryoSat Science Meeting.
Jan 2017
Awarded $5,000 Series-A funding from the UWindsor Winter Hackathon (diverted to WinSAT).