The team

Brandon works on orbital modeling and flight software. At UC Santa Barbara’s Yeung Group he built ODEM-S, a nonlinear dynamical model that forecasts low-Earth-orbit debris growth through 2050 using coupled differential equations, stochastic collision probabilities and time-varying launch rates, calibrated against roughly 12,000 satellite launches.

He was principal scientist and software lead for payloads on NASA’s High Altitude Student Platform and RockSat-X, leading six developers across downlink, sensor integration and post-flight analysis. That work included a custom telemetry protocol and Python data pipeline for a 10-channel Geiger-counter payload. With the Colorado Space Grant Consortium he programmed the sensor suite of a LunaSat bound for the lunar surface.

Before Vyper he founded Hubble, an academic collaboration platform, and Shaman, a model-based forecasting engine.

Tamerlan is a mechanical engineering student at Yale who builds hardware and robotics. He works with the Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association (YUAA) on digital sun-sensor calibration for spacecraft attitude determination and is a member of the Yale Entrepreneurial Society (YES).

He designed and built Pi Board, a self-playing Raspberry Pi chessboard whose XY mechanism moves magnets beneath the board to slide the pieces. His software tracks their positions across the 8×8 grid. The project was featured by Hackaday and Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, formerly The MagPi.

His hardware projects also include a 1:3 replica of the Curiosity Mars rover with rocker-bogie suspension, an FPV camera and a robotic arm. He has also built several generations of robotic arms, from early prototypes to custom 3D-printed designs.

Through MITES Semester, he co-developed a space-image classifier using MobileNetV2 and TensorFlow.js to classify planets, galaxies, nebulae and comets. He also contributed wiring, sensor integration and programming to a wildfire-alert prototype at Prakses.

He is also a FIDE-rated chess player.