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Launch pad0 km

One human. One mission.

Advance humanity toward
3.0 on the Kardashev scale

Sahil Chaudhary

I’m an aerospace engineer driven by a fascination with space, rockets, and the future of humanity.

I’m studying across engineering, physics, AI, energy, and other frontier fields with one long-term goal: help make Earth better, push humanity beyond the stars, and eventually turn today’s science fiction into real technology.

Aerospace Engineer · Builder   Explore ↓

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Interplanetary space. Where it began.

It started on the last bench.

Where it began

7th grade

It started in the seventh grade, on the last bench of a classroom near the end of the school day. “If nobody has ever gone there, maybe one day we will.”

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My best friend and I were talking about a video we had seen on black holes and wormholes — how black holes pull everything toward them, how strange wormholes are supposed to be, and how some theories suggest they could connect distant places, or perhaps something even stranger.

At some point, the conversation became simple:

We genuinely decided that someday we would try to go on a mission to a black hole.

I went home that day and started reading more.

One question became another. Black holes led to space. Space led to rockets. Rockets led to physics, engineering and eventually the much larger question of what humanity could become.

Rockets & ambition

9th grade

A few years later, around ninth grade, I discovered Elon Musk and became fascinated not only by rockets, but by the idea that an individual could decide to work on problems that looked impossibly large. That pushed me toward the idea of someday building a space company of my own.

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From there, my curiosity kept expanding.

I started reading about people like Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Nikola Tesla and Michio Kaku. I became interested in biographies, philosophy, science fiction, and people like Steve Jobs who approached building in completely different ways.

Slowly, the dream stopped being only about rockets.

Aerospace engineering

That fascination eventually became concrete enough that I chose to study Aerospace Engineering.

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I began thinking about interstellar spacecraft, advanced propulsion, Dyson spheres, artificial intelligence, energy, robotics and technologies that today still sound like science fiction.

Eventually I discovered the idea of civilization scales and Type III civilizations.

That gave a name to something I had already been imagining for years.

The long game

Now

I know I may never see most of these things completed in my lifetime. I also know how extraordinarily difficult some of them are.

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But I don’t think difficulty is a good enough reason not to move toward them.

So I’m trying to build my life in that direction — learning across fields, building things, starting companies, becoming a better engineer, and working on technologies that could move humanity even a little closer to that future.

I still want to see how far we can go.

The mission. A direction for a lifetime.

My mission is to spend my life helping push humanity toward a Type III civilization.

That ambition started with a fascination for space. As a kid, I became obsessed with black holes, wormholes, interstellar travel, and the idea that humanity could someday go far beyond Earth. What began as curiosity slowly became something much larger.

Over time, rockets led me to engineering. Engineering led me to physics, energy, AI, robotics, and the technologies that shape civilization itself. I started thinking beyond simply reaching space.

What would it take to build a civilization capable of surviving across planets, harnessing energy at extraordinary scales, constructing technologies like Dyson spheres, developing radically new propulsion systems, and eventually travelling between stars?

Most of those goals are far beyond what one person — or perhaps even one generation — can achieve. But that doesn’t make them meaningless.

I want to build technologies that move humanity in that direction: first by improving life and technological capability on Earth, then by helping expand civilization beyond it.

Earth is where the work begins.

The stars are where I want it to lead.

I don’t think the path starts with a spaceship.

Before SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk built Zip2 and X.com. That made something click for me: before trying to build the most capital-intensive technologies in the world, I may first need to build companies that solve real problems, create real value, and give me the resources, experience and network to attempt something much larger.

01

An earthly foundation

Build ventures

First, I want to build companies in areas such as AI, robotics, blockchain and other emerging technologies — not as distractions from the long-term mission, but as stepping stones toward it.

The goal is to spend a few years building useful companies, learning how to build teams, products, infrastructure and organizations, and eventually use that foundation to start the space company I ultimately want to build.

02

Access to space

Reusable rockets

Fully reusable rockets, launch systems, advanced propulsion and the technologies required to move humanity farther into space.

03

Somewhere to stay

Moon / Mars

The technologies required to turn temporary missions into permanent civilization: habitats, energy systems, resource utilization, manufacturing, robotics, transportation and life-support infrastructure.

04

Farther than orbit

Spaceships

Beyond rockets and planetary bases, I eventually want to work toward spacecraft designed for long-duration travel — vehicles built not just to reach orbit, but to carry humanity deeper into the Solar System and one day toward the stars.

05

The science underneath it all

Sci-fi engineering

Studying and building technologies inspired by biology and the nanoscale world — from nanorobotics and biomimetic machines to future systems that could improve health, manufacturing, exploration and survival in extreme environments.

New materials and manufacturing approaches — including areas such as graphene and nanomaterials — that could enable lighter, stronger, more efficient and more capable machines.

Intelligent systems that can reason, design, operate machines, automate scientific work and eventually help humans build and maintain complex systems both on Earth and beyond it.

06

A longer horizon

Type I / Type II / Type III

Help move Earth toward a more advanced and energy-abundant civilization.

Then keep pushing toward the kind of civilization that can operate across planets, stars and eventually far beyond them.

I don’t see these as separate interests. To me, they are pieces of the same long-term puzzle.

The exact path will change. The direction won’t.

What I work with

Aerospace

Aerodynamics, compressible flow, propulsion, rocket engineering, flight mechanics, orbital mechanics, GNC / RCS, CFD, structures / FEA

Engineering & Simulation

ANSYS Fluent, ANSYS Structural (FEA), Pointwise, SU2, OpenFOAM, Gmsh, ParaView, SolidWorks, MATLAB

Code (mostly vibe coding)

Python, C++, JavaScript

AI / Software

LLMs, AI agents, APIs, AI-assisted engineering

Hardware

Arduino, ESP32, sensors, rapid prototyping

Experience

National Aerospace Laboratories

CFD Division — Aerospace Engineering Intern

Hands-on experience working with CFD workflows and tools including Pointwise, Gmsh, SU2, OpenFOAM and related simulation processes.

Currently learning

Advanced CFD, propulsion, AI systems, robotics, physics

Currently building

AI-native engineering tools, startup ideas, aerospace systems

Cislunar space, 384,400 km. Coming in.

Learning by making.

Rockets, simulations, engineering tools. Some finished, some still taking shape.

Aerospace

Flight, flow, propulsion, and the work of learning to build rockets.

Model Rocketry Team

Completed / Discontinued

Designing, building, and launching our first rocket.

Explore

Led my college model rocketry team and worked on the design, development, and launch of our first rocket. We successfully completed the launch, but the team later dissolved and the project was discontinued.

Wind Tunnel Experiments

Completed

Printed test articles and pressure measurements in a wind tunnel.

Explore

Designed and 3D-printed a rocket nose cone and wing test article, added pressure tap points, and tested them in a wind tunnel to study aerodynamic behavior and measure quantities such as pressure distribution, drag, and aerodynamic forces.

Variable-Geometry Scramjet

Active exploration

Exploring an inlet that adapts to different flight conditions.

Explore

Ongoing exploration into how a scramjet inlet could move beyond fixed geometry and adapt its shape for different operating conditions. The goal is to understand where variable geometry could improve inlet performance and how the idea might eventually be used in future high-speed propulsion systems.

Cold-Gas Reaction Control System

Prototype / partially tested

Nitrogen thrusters, attitude control, and a 6-DOF study.

Explore

Designed and studied a small reaction control system using a gaseous-nitrogen tank and four cold-gas thrusters. The project included propulsion testing, CFD and FEA simulations, PID-based attitude-control logic, and a 6-DOF dynamics study.

The work reached the simulation and limited testing stage, but was not developed into a fully validated flight-ready system.

CFD Studies

Finished

Aerodynamic and compressible-flow studies, from airfoils to grid fins.

Explore

Worked on multiple aerodynamic and compressible-flow CFD cases including the ONERA M6 wing, RAE2822 supercritical airfoil, converging-diverging nozzle, grid fins, and other rocket and wing configurations.

Used ANSYS Fluent, Pointwise, SU2, Gmsh, OpenFOAM, and ParaView to study meshing, shocks, flow behavior, aerodynamic forces, pressure distribution, solver workflows, numerical methods, and some underlying mathematical solutions.

From my internship report: CSIR NAL, Bangalore

Three months in the Computational & Theoretical Fluid Dynamics (CTFD) Division at CSIR National Aerospace Laboratories (18 Aug to 18 Nov 2025), working through meshing, SU2 simulation, ParaView post-processing and validation against experimental data.

NACA 0012 airfoil. Structured C-mesh and O-mesh with a boundary-layer extrusion in Pointwise and GMSH, inviscid Euler simulations in SU2 at several angles of attack, and Cp distributions and contours in ParaView.

RAE2822 supercritical airfoil. RANS with the Spalart–Allmaras model at about Mach 0.729 and 2.31° angle of attack. The shock location matched the experiment closely, with minor differences in pressure recovery near the trailing edge.

ONERA M6 wing. A 3D unstructured mesh refined around mid-span, run at about Mach 0.8395 and 3.06° angle of attack. Cp was compared with wind-tunnel data at y/b = 0.20, 0.44, 0.65, 0.80, 0.90 and 0.95, and the higher tip suction peak and the shock strengthening along the span were captured, with reasonable agreement.

Eglin wing-store separation. Mesh built in Pointwise, store translation and rotation scripted with rotation matrices from experimental positions (6-DOF), simulated in SU2, with forces, moments, trajectories and flow features post-processed in ParaView, plus mesh-independence and convergence checks.

Read the full internship report (PDF) →

Store Separation Simulation

Finished

Simulating a store released from an aircraft using CFD and rigid-body dynamics.

Explore

Built a CFD-based store-separation study for a missile/store released from an aircraft.

Created and refined the mesh in Pointwise, configured flow and motion conditions in SU2, advanced the store through multiple time steps using scripting, and studied 6-DOF behavior including pitch, roll, yaw, translation, orientation, aerodynamic forces and moments.

The work involved rotation matrices, Newtonian mechanics, rigid-body equations, and post-processing of the separation trajectory.

Aerospace software

Tools that make engineering work better.

CaseForge

Open source / Built

An open-source toolkit for repeatable SU2 workflows.

Explore

Built an open-source workflow toolkit for SU2 to make CFD case setup and execution easier and more repeatable.

The project focuses on reducing repetitive setup work, organizing simulation cases cleanly, and improving workflows around running and managing SU2-based CFD studies.

AI-Native CAE

Active development

AI agents for engineering workflows, with the engineer in control.

Explore

Building an AI-native, solver-independent engineering platform aimed at making CFD, FEA, thermal, and other CAE workflows easier to create, execute, debug, and understand.

The system is being designed around AI agents that can work with tools such as OpenFOAM, SU2, Gmsh, and ParaView while keeping the engineer in control of the underlying physics and workflow.

Other builds / study

Experiments beyond aerospace.

AI Expiry Tracker

Built / Experimental

Tracking product expiry dates with AI assistance.

Explore

Built an AI-assisted application for tracking product expiry dates and helping users identify what is approaching expiration before it is forgotten or wasted.

Quantum Computing Study

Completed study

An introduction to quantum computing and its applications.

Explore

Completed introductory study and certification work in quantum computing to understand its fundamental concepts, computational model, and potential applications.

Geostationary orbit, 35,786 km. What comes next.

Frontiers

Ideas, companies and technologies I’m building toward next.

Active

Optic

Understand and improve how your public digital footprint is interpreted.

Zip3

Find local people, skills, services, and capabilities through AI.

Want to work on it? Reach me →

Started working

Personal AI Twin

A personalized AI that learns how you think, work, and decide.

Decentralized Identity + AI

More control over digital identity, verification, and reputation.

Swarm Drones

Autonomous drones that coordinate and operate together.

AI-Native Aerospace Software

On hold

Intelligent tools for designing and simulating aerospace systems.

Stealth

Blockchain

Exploring blockchain infrastructure and digital transactions.

Biotech / Bioscience

Exploring a biotechnology problem I’m not ready to share yet.

Long term

Space Company

Working on it, target launch 2030–2032

From reusable rockets in India to infrastructure, spacecraft, and civilization beyond Earth.

Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials

Materials for difficult rocket and space-infrastructure problems.

Biomimetic Engineering

Learning from nature to solve engineering problems on Earth and beyond.

Type I Civilization Technologies

Energy, climate, and infrastructure for a more capable Earth.

…and many more.

Low Earth orbit, 400 km. Between worlds.

Mind

People, ideas, books and words that shaped how I think.

People

Elon Musk

Hugely inspired

Elon Musk deeply influenced my first-principles thinking, fascination with rockets, and engineering ambition. His example helped shape how I think about building companies before moonshots, tackling problems that seem impossible, and humanity’s long-term future at a civilization scale.

Prophet Muhammad

Hugely inspired

Shaped how I think about life wisdom, character, leadership, discipline, responsibility, how to treat people, and spiritual grounding.

My Dad

Major personal influence

Steve Jobs

Influence

Nikola Tesla

Influence

Michio Kaku

Influence

Stephen Hawking

Influence

Albert Einstein

Influence

Naval Ravikant

Leverage, specific knowledge, wealth, long-term decision-making, reading, independence, and clear judgment.

Also inspired by

Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Feynman, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Jensen Huang

Words I live by

Use the left and right arrow keys to browse quotes.

Ideas

Books, questions, and things that changed me.

Things I never want to forget

Videos, images, books, speeches, articles, moments.

Stratosphere, 30 km. Learning on the way.

Wisdom

Things I’m learning from engineering, building, books, mistakes, science and life.

Launch pad, 0 km. Earth is where the work begins.

Say hi.

If you’re building something difficult, researching something strange, or thinking seriously about humanity’s future, I’d probably enjoy talking to you.

Emailsahilonnet1@gmail.comGitHubgithub.com/sahil-elonLinkedInsahil-chaudhary-266876252X@sahil_jc