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.
An idea becomes a rule. A rule shapes an orbit, a planet, a patch of soil. What grows there comes back as the next idea. I explore how rules, incentives, and institutions can help people meet shared challenges with more care and accountability.
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.
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.