Anirudh Agarwal on Space Debris, Kessler Syndrome & Building Useful Tech
Anirudh Agarwal — Engineer, Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Space Enthusiast, & Structural Engineer at Project S
Anirudh Agarwal is a mechanical engineer, entrepreneur, environmentalist, and space enthusiast who has built his career at the intersection of advanced manufacturing and real-world impact. Now serving as a structural engineer at Project S — a freshly funded Munich-based in-orbit debris detection startup — Agarwal brings a rare combination of satellite manufacturing experience and founder-level thinking to one of the most urgent sustainability challenges of our era: keeping Earth's orbital highways open for future generations.
Agarwal traces his engineering identity back to a simple childhood declaration. "Since childhood, I used to say I wanted to be a scientist," he tells host Myles. That ambition crystallised during his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee), where an introduction to manufacturing technology proved to be a turning point. "I instantly saw it as the thing I want to do with my life," he recalls. Over time, he refined the distinction between science and engineering in his own mind: "I realized I actually always wanted to be an inventor — implement established scientific principles to develop something new rather than uncover fundamental principles themselves."
After his bachelor's, Agarwal pursued a master's degree at the National University of Singapore (NUS), specialising in manufacturing technology and automation. Singapore introduced him to the concept of technopreneurship — a word he uses to describe the fertile middle ground between pure academia and the corporate world. "I get to build something highly technical while having a real-time and real-world impact on society," he explains. Startups, he adds, are "specifically targeted towards disruptive and explosive growth, delivering whatever new technology I develop to more people in a shorter time." He began attending startup events, building his network, and eventually founded his first venture.
Before Project S, Agarwal gathered an unusually wide range of engineering experience. He has worked across soft robotics, food 3D printing, 3D printing of magnetic materials, and satellite manufacturing — always in interdisciplinary teams. His approach to product development was consistently user-centred: he observed how colleagues interacted with tools and adapted accordingly. When he noticed teammates manually editing gcode for embedded 3D printing, he wrote a script to generate clean gcode directly. When presenting food 3D printing to new audiences, he tailored the printed shapes — superhero figures for children, a yin-and-yang design made with Western and Asian recipes for a Singaporean news channel.
In satellite manufacturing, this same instinct led him to a broader role. "When designing the mechanical aspects of the satellite, I recognized the interdependencies with various other subsystems," he explains, "which led me to transition into systems engineering, allowing the structure to adapt to the changing landscape of components and constraints in the satellite design process."
Project S is an in-orbit debris detection startup based in Munich. Agarwal frames the problem with striking clarity: everything humanity has ever launched into space that was not designed to return or burn up is still there. Every defunct satellite, every failed launch, every explosion generates thousands of new fragments. "The more debris pieces there are, the higher the chances of collision, thus producing more debris," he explains.
Left unchecked, this dynamic leads toward what scientists call Kessler Syndrome — a cascading effect in which one collision generates enough debris to trigger further collisions, compounding exponentially until launching anything new becomes impossible. The concept was proposed by NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler and Burton G. Cour-Palais in 1978; it describes a situation in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit becomes so high due to space pollution that collisions cascade, exponentially increasing the amount of debris over time.
Agarwal is emphatic that this is not a distant, abstract threat. "Our modern lives down here on Earth depend on space infrastructure," he says, listing GPS, internet, satellite communications and broadcasts, environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, climate modelling, and land-use tracking as just some of the services at risk. "It is the bedrock of our modern way of life. Without access to space, life will be completely different."
His analogy is deliberately grounded: "Just like down on earth, we must be net-carbon negative; in space, we must be net debris negative." Project S is tackling this challenge from the starting point — detection. The company recently emerged from stealth, announcing multi-million-euro seed funding to deploy an end-to-end orbital intelligence system, developing space-based radar payloads, AI analytics, and decision-support software designed to detect sub-centimetre space debris and support collision avoidance for satellite operators. The longer-term roadmap, as Agarwal describes it, moves from detection toward active debris reduction.
One of the most candid moments of the interview comes when Agarwal reflects on how his thinking about product development has shifted. "As an engineer at heart first and foremost, I hyper-fixated on the technology and solving a hard technical problem," he admits. Engineering education, he argues, trains people to solve a given problem statement because "that is the goal in itself." But leadership demands something different.
"As a leader, defining the problem well is the real objective," he says. "Finding the through line that connects the technology, the technical and financial constraints, suppliers, and the customer problem well is the biggest problem to solve as a product developer or a company leader." Once the problem is sharply defined, he argues, much of the solution can often be assembled from existing tools and talented specialists — people who can "hyper-fixate and solve it" far better than any individual founder could alone.
His perspective shift is direct: "Before working with startups, I thought that making a great product is what matters most. My new perspective is that defining the market problem and adequately communicating it to your team is what matters most."
When advising early-stage founders, Agarwal returns to the same pattern he has seen repeatedly: technical founders build impressive products that no one wants. His recommended antidote is Rob Fitzpatrick's book The Mom Test. The principle is simple — do not tell potential customers about your solution; instead, ask them about their problems. How significant is the issue to them? What are they already doing to address it? How much time or money have they already invested in working around it?
"You may find that what you need to make is completely different from what you originally intended," he acknowledges. "But that's ok. At least now you know what to solve." He stresses that this is not a one-time exercise: "Make sure you do this continuously, as everyone's situation is dynamic and their needs might change over time. Continuous feedback and objective statement updates are important."
For Agarwal, the work at Project S aligns directly with a professional philosophy he has held since college: "mass-produce useful technologies to make them available and affordable for all." Space debris detection is, in his framing, a sustainability problem as urgent as carbon emissions — just less visible from the ground. Project S aims to combine radar sensor technology, AI-supported orbit data, and collision avoidance into an end-to-end security infrastructure for satellites, while also developing technologies to remove space debris in the long term. The startup's founding and early funding represent a significant step toward making orbital safety infrastructure a commercial reality.
Beyond his current role, Agarwal draws on his wide-ranging experience in research, prototyping, and interdisciplinary engineering to share hard-won lessons with the next generation of technical founders — a thread that runs through everything he does.
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