work

Work

The network on the ground, the software that has flown, and the tools I built rather than rented.

The network

I design, own, and operate AS399646, a transit network with four points of presence: Houston, Kansas City, Orlando, and Los Angeles. The backbone runs MPLS between POPs and the edge is on Juniper MX204. Address space is allocated directly, not resold, so the ASN and the prefixes are mine to announce. Route policy, filtering, and dissemination run on tooling I wrote rather than an off-the-shelf daemon.

  • AS399646 Autonomous system, owned ASN and prefixes
  • 4 POPs HOU, MCI, MCO, LAX
  • MPLS Backbone between points of presence
  • MX204 Juniper edge routing
  • ~4,400 Direct and downstream customers
  • Direct ARIN allocations, not a reseller

Flight heritage

Software I was responsible for has reached TRL-9 flight heritage: it has run in space, not just in a lab. It has flown on Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander and on the International Space Station through the MISSE-FF and StaARS-EF payloads. FlightDesk, the mission control software I work on, is in active use.

  • Blue Ghost Firefly Aerospace lunar lander. Flight software heritage.
  • ISS · MISSE-FF Materials International Space Station Experiment flight facility payload.
  • ISS · StaARS-EF Space Station payload, experiment facility.
  • FlightDesk Mission control software in active use for orbital operations.

In-house platforms

Everything below is built in house by choice. When renting a component would leave a gap in how the network runs, I write the component. The list is the argument: this is a stack designed from bare metal up to orbital hardware, not assembled from other people’s defaults.

DartMesh

Proprietary layer 2 overlay network. Noise IKpsk2 handshake with ChaCha20-Poly1305 for transport encryption.

Noise · ChaCha20-Poly1305

dn-bgp

BGP route server written in Go. Handles path filtering and route dissemination across the backbone.

Go · BGP

DART Shield

DDoS mitigation. BGP FlowSpec rules and remotely triggered black hole routing, applied at the edge.

FlowSpec · RTBH

DartCore

Bare metal provisioning over iPXE. Brings new hardware into service without hands on the box.

iPXE · Provisioning

DartTrust

Fraud scoring engine. Go service with a Python and XGBoost model behind the decisions.

Go · Python · XGBoost

Vader

Billing and operations platform. Runs the commercial side of the network.

Billing · Operations

Inception

PHP application framework the internal tools are built on.

PHP

FlightDesk

Mission control software. Telemetry and payload operations for active missions.

Telemetry · Mission control

ip.space Foundation and ORP

The ip.space Foundation is a Texas nonprofit I co-founded, with 501(c)(3) status pending. It works on open standards for routing the internet across orbit. My father and I co-authored a whitepaper on the Orbital Routing Protocol (ORP).

  • Open standards for orbital internet routing
  • Texas nonprofit, 501(c)(3) pending
  • ORP whitepaper, co-authored

Links to the foundation and the ORP whitepaper will go here once they are live.