physics @princeton | starshield @spacex | 17, tjhsst
nyc/dc
Joined August 2022
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excited to be joining @SpaceX next summer as a Satellite Engineering Intern on the Starshield team in Hawthorne!
looking forward to learning from an incredible team and contributing to the mission.
princeton undergrad talent right here
My dude. This is completely true.
In 1976, a 21-year old Princeton undegrad named John A. Phillips wanted to see if he could figure out how to make a nuclear bomb as a class project.
It took him mere months.
The FBI then confiscated his paper and the prototype bomb they found in his room. It would have been 1/3 as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima, and according to one nuclear scientist, "virtually guaranteed to work".
But hey -- at least he earned an A.
congrats navya!
Navya Tuteja, a student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology outside Washington, D.C., launched Raaha, a free platform that lets neurodivergent job seekers score a listing for fit before they apply. bit.ly/4AzP1CN
got special approval to take a course called “violent politics” this semester.
it’s probably my favorite course right now because it’s just so fascinating to study conflicts (and near misses) and analyze why some escalate into violence while others don’t. such an interesting lens to understand politics and defense.
i could genuinely talk about this stuff for hours.
i’m also indian american. my parents immigrated here about 20 years ago with almost nothing. they’ve worked extremely hard ever since and have contributed meaningfully to the american economy.
i was born in the united states. i’ve spent my whole life here and have only visited india once. i’m deeply patriotic to america and western values, yet i respect and value my cultural heritage. i’ve worked on systems that are part of the golden dome, yet i still celebrate diwali with my family.
nothing about that seems contradictory to me.
to me, america is a country “where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything.” my parents believed in that ideal enough to build a life here, and i’m fortunate to believe in it too.
i’m incredibly grateful for the country i get to call home.
i rarely talk about being indian american bc i always figured there are more interesting things to discuss.
maybe it's relevant today…im a second-gen immigrant, 21 yr old brown girl. my parents were entrepreneurs who believed in the american dream.
my dad is catholic, mom is hindu. i grew up going to temple on saturdays and mass sunday mornings. this combination existed bc of their love for each other. at church, i never cared nor thought others cared we were the only brown people there... i think everyone, like me, was too busy being God-fearing.
imho this principle holds true in many things. our shallowly distinct traits are pretty uninteresting when you're a part of something greater.
i went to johns hopkins, we didn't exactly have ut football..but i studied hard and we'd still slam tequila shots at the college bar, go to tailgates and state football games, meet people of all backgrounds.
i grew up going to the local drive-in theater and playing outside with the neighbors after school. my childhood best friend taught me about her family's farm and horse riding. she came to mine where we'd eat after my mom would oil both our hair.
shenadoah and our national parks hold a special place in my heart, as do ashrams back in india, bollywood movies and 2000s romcoms…i've had the honor to play for this country in my sport and just learned how to shoot a gun. make damn good kebabs and love a good bbq, will always touch my elders' feet, and take pride in my culture, hospitality and this country.
i don’t drink beer but i'm a proud american bc of my values. i want to create a beautiful family here. i believe in hard work, in the law, in contributing to the country we love and respect.
"all the things we could fear in this world and we pick love"
we’ve all probably realized that it’s easier to give advice than to follow it ourselves. distance strips away the emotions and ego that distract from otherwise obvious empirical decisions.
maybe the reason wisdom comes from age isn’t only because of experience. maybe it’s also a matter of seeing from far enough away.
solomon’s paradox.
could agent-based models be used as a counterfactual arm to test policy?
the challenge is that much of society is conditioned on unobserved variables, so it’s inaccessible to training data. how do we infer these latent variables well enough to trust the sim?
a lot of people ask me why i’m majoring in physics instead of aerospace engineering if i want to build a space tech startup. and this is a huge part of the reason why (in addition to the fact that i just love physics).
having a first-principles physics intuition will enable me to develop novel ideas, whereas i believe that i can learn many engineering skills on the job.
imo, engineering teaches you how things are currently done, while physics tells you everything that’s actually possible (by giving a general understanding of the fundamentals that everything else builds on).
to be clear, i deeply respect engineering (nothing can get to orbit without it!). but for me personally, i think physics is the best bet to push my thinking to the edge of what’s known.
fun fact: even the ceo of @SUBWAY was a PhD physicist, which just goes to show versatile the major truly is
I’ve heard several times that “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” What people often omit is the rest of the quote: “but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
That omitted half is increasingly becoming the important half. My belief (that many may not agree with) is that deep specialization is now often a liability. For generations, we rewarded the person who spent 10,000 hours mastering one craft, because execution was scarce. But now, AI is commoditizing execution. Even the world’s best AI companies, like OpenAI, have 100% of their code written by AI itself.
Judgment across boundaries, on the other hand, can’t be commoditized. For example, evaluating a space company requires orbital mechanics, government procurement, manufacturing, unit economics, and founder psychology. Five fields, but no PhD in any of them. The specialist builds a perfect model of the wrong world, whereas the generalist asks questions the model can’t answer.
I don’t believe expertise is becoming irrelevant. But the advantage is shifting increasingly toward people who can cultivate depth when necessary while remaining relentlessly curious across an array of fields. In today’s AI-enabled world, breadth is increasingly what makes expertise useful.
I’ve heard several times that “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” What people often omit is the rest of the quote: “but oftentimes better than a master of one.”
That omitted half is increasingly becoming the important half. My belief (that many may not agree with) is that deep specialization is now often a liability. For generations, we rewarded the person who spent 10,000 hours mastering one craft, because execution was scarce. But now, AI is commoditizing execution. Even the world’s best AI companies, like OpenAI, have 100% of their code written by AI itself.
Judgment across boundaries, on the other hand, can’t be commoditized. For example, evaluating a space company requires orbital mechanics, government procurement, manufacturing, unit economics, and founder psychology. Five fields, but no PhD in any of them. The specialist builds a perfect model of the wrong world, whereas the generalist asks questions the model can’t answer.
I don’t believe expertise is becoming irrelevant. But the advantage is shifting increasingly toward people who can cultivate depth when necessary while remaining relentlessly curious across an array of fields. In today’s AI-enabled world, breadth is increasingly what makes expertise useful.
Satellites have spent the last 70 years getting closer to Earth.
The first communications satellites, starting with Telstar in 1962, operated tens of thousands of kilometers above us. Over the past few years, satellites shifted to under a thousand kilometers above us, towards Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with constellations like @Starlink.
I’m convinced the next step is even lower: Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), which lies about 100–450 km above Earth.
That unlocks incredible capabilities. Being closer to Earth means ~4x stronger communication links, in addition to lower latency and higher-resolution imagery, all while having smaller satellites. VLEO could make continuous direct-to-cell connectivity practical while enabling dramatically more detailed and frequently updated Earth surveillance for defense purposes.
So if it’s so much better, the question becomes “why haven’t we built satellites there yet?” The answer is quite simple: air. There’s enough atmosphere at those altitudes that drag can pull an unpropelled satellite out of orbit within just a matter of months. But air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) could completely remove that constraint by capturing residual atmospheric particles, and then ionizing and accelerating them as propellant to continuously counteract drag.
China is already moving aggressively: several VLEO satellites are in orbit and CASIC plans a 300-satellite constellation by 2030. The U.S. lags behind, but the market is beginning to form. Viridian Space received $1.25M from the Air Force about a year ago, @redwire received a $44M DARPA contract last November, and @albedo received $12M from the Air Force and even launched their first satellite (Clarity-1) this March before raising a Series B at a $285M valuation in April.
The reason this is uniquely occurring now lies in the convergence of two key technologies: (1) advances in high-efficiency electric propulsion are making VLEO flight increasingly feasible and (2) reusable rockets have collapsed launch costs enough to make shorter-lived constellations like those in VLEO much more economical.
And due to the benefits for surveillance, defense can serve as the anchor customer that pulls the technology across the valley of death. I think we’re at the beginning of that transition now: VLEO is moving from an orbit satellites struggle to survive in to an entirely new layer of the space economy.
lots of meetings seem to expand to fill the time allocated to them, rather than the time actually needed (experiencing this at orientation lol).
how do you design meetings around information density rather than arbitrary time blocks?
the saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover.”
i’ve always thought this to be a strange saying, because the cover is designed by publishers precisely to be judged.
and people do the very same thing: haircut, attire, posture, even something as simple as the way someone walks into a room. most of that is chosen, so when we’re judging someone, we are reading a message the person authored.
the trouble isn’t the inevitable process of judging, but rather that we often stop reading after just the cover.
