raghav.pl

Aerospace @ CU Boulder — Founder @ Testra.co

hello@raghav.pl github: sraghav63 instagram: raghav.pol discord: raghavp
resume
500+ users on Testra
10k+ followers on LunarWire
$4M NSF CubeSat mission · 6 universities
experience:
SwarmEx Satellite Project · CU Boulder Dec 2025 – Present
Software / Ground Systems Developer · NSF-funded
  • Built a Python telemetry parser for raw CubeSat packet streams, extracting CCSDS-style headers, APID, sequence counts, timestamps, packet lengths and housekeeping fields.
  • Converted raw hex/binary telemetry into structured CSV/JSON, with packet-structure and field-consistency checks to catch malformed packets.
  • Maintain ground-system tooling for a multi-satellite autonomy mission targeting low Earth orbit.
swarm-ex · 3 × 3U cubesats · 380–500 kmrender: stanford slab ↗
Render of the three SWARM-EX CubeSats in low Earth orbit with the mission patch
$4M NSF Ideas Lab grant ↗ 150+ students · NSF feature ↗ NSF award #1936665 ↗
Essium / Testra Mar 2025 – Present
Founder & Developer · Remote
  • Built and shipped an AI-assisted student web app with Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL/Convex and LLM APIs, reaching 500+ users.
  • Built auth, backend/API integrations, embedding-based retrieval with Qdrant, and production deployment infrastructure.
essium.ai · live↗
Essium, the AI college essay reviewer, landing page
live demo · ccsds telemetry parser:

Simulated packets, decoded in your browser — same structure my SwarmEx ground tooling parses. SWARM-EX flight software uses the CCSDS 133.0-B-2 Space Packet Protocol.

raw packet · 15 bytes
primary header timestamp housekeeping
rolling log
    fieldrawvalue
    packets parsed0
    malformed caught0
    technical projects:
    Hybrid Rocket Engine Hot-Fire Test Fall 2025
    Intro to Rocket Engineering · Experimental Testing / Data Analysis
    • Designed and tested a nitrous-oxide/PLA hybrid rocket engine on an 8-person team, through cold-flow and hot-fire testing.
    • Analyzed DAQ oxidizer pressure, chamber pressure and thrust against theory; found a ~0.3 s anomaly where oxidizer pressure fell from ~2500 to ~700 psi in <0.1 s.
    Hot-fire pressure vs time, schematic Oxidizer pressure drops from about 2500 psi to about 700 psi between 1.6 and 1.7 seconds and stays low until 1.9 seconds. Chamber pressure dips to about 150 psi over the same window. 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 time (s) psi ~0.3 s anomaly · 2500 → 700 psi in <0.1 s oxidizer pressure chamber pressure
    Schematic of the anomaly I identified in the DAQ data — key values from the test report, not the raw trace.
    Exoplanet Habitability Filter Fall 2025
    ASEN 1030 · Intro to Computing for Aerospace
    • Filtered NASA exoplanet data for habitable-zone candidates, mining targets and super-Earths; plotted Earth similarity vs. arrival time and planet size vs. temperature.
    featured by instructor ↗
    Quadruple Inverted Pendulum RL 2026
    Controls · Reinforcement Learning
    • MuJoCo + Gymnasium environment for balancing a 1–4 link inverted pendulum on a cart, trained with SAC/PPO, with actuator lag, sensor noise and disturbances modeled for realism.
    github: Quadruple ↗
    additional aerospace:
    LunarWire · Space Reporting Platform 2023 – 2025
    Aerospace Technical Researcher & Writer
    • Researched and published technical explainers on orbital mechanics, launch vehicles, satellite systems and mission design; grew the platform to 10,000+ followers.
    leadership & activities:
    CU Sounding Rocket Laboratory (CUSRL) Sep 2026 – Present
    Vehicle Design Member
    • Student team behind Mamba III: 89,800 ft apogee at Mach 3.36 (Oct 2025); next target is 350,000+ ft.
    cusrl.com/mamba ↗
    Civil Air Patrol 2023 – 2025
    Cadet Airman First Class
    • Aerospace education, rocketry, pilot orientation flights, volunteer events and emergency-services training.
    education:
    University of Colorado Boulder Expected May 2029
    B.S. Aerospace Engineering
    • Statics, General Physics I & II, Calculus III, Chemistry for Energy & Materials, Intro to Computing for Aerospace, First-Year Projects; current: Thermodynamics
    #6 public aerospace undergrad · US News 2026 ↗
    technical skills:
    Languages
    Python TypeScript JavaScript MATLAB SQL Bash HTML/CSS
    Aerospace
    CubeSat ground systems Telemetry processing CCSDS packet parsing Spacecraft telemetry Test-data analysis SolidWorks
    Software / Tools
    Git Linux Docker Next.js Node.js PostgreSQL Convex Qdrant Firebase Supabase