About
Some engineers build deep expertise in one narrow domain. I have always been more drawn to understanding how the parts connect and how a complex system holds together as a whole. That instinct is what brought me to systems engineering.
At sixteen, I built the mechanical and electronic system for a 16-inch Dobson telescope: the frame, the mirror cell, a motorized mount with stepper motors and encoders wired to a control board built to Mel Bartel's specifications, connected via RS-232 to a laptop running scope.exe under MS-DOS. There was no GUI, just a terminal and a set of commands I had to learn to trust. I got micro-stepping working. I also ran into flexure errors in the frame that I could not fully compensate, mostly because I did not yet have the engineering tools to properly measure or predict them. The telescope pointed well enough to use, and the experience of knowing roughly why something was failing but not yet having the means to fix it properly stayed with me for a long time.
Twenty years later, I am starting it again at a scale that requires everything I know. The plan is a 1-metre robotic observatory built entirely from scratch: spin-casting a borosilicate glass blank in a furnace of my own design, through interferometric optical figuring, vacuum mirror coating, structural FEA, mechatronic mount design, and autonomous observatory control software. The methodology will follow the same discipline as a space programme. The whole process will be documented publicly at moltenlight.space as it unfolds, with the hope that people who know more than me on any given phase will find it and weigh in.
This blog is where I work through the same instinct professionally: systems engineering methodology, structural analysis, and the technical decisions that sit underneath both.
The engineering foundation
My aerospace engineering career started at GDTech, performing advanced structural, thermal, and creep analysis on flight-critical components for the European space and defence industry. I worked independently, across projects that required switching physical domains without losing technical rigour.
The work included non-linear FEA of a composite structural stage of the Ariane 6 launcher using SAMCEF; coupled thermal-structural analysis of a jet engine turbine blade under high-temperature, high-RPM operating conditions; vibration mode analysis of aircraft wing fuel tanks for propellant sloshing dynamics prediction; and creep modelling of a structural component under sustained combined thermal and mechanical loading. Clients included ESA, SAFRAN, SABCA, SONACA, and Pratt & Whitney.
Before GDTech, I did an internship at LuxSpace in Luxembourg. The project was a solar sail deployment mechanism: designing and implementing the electromechanical system, working with ultra-thin membranes under tension, and defining the test protocol used to validate the FEA model against the physical hardware.
Building things end-to-end
Between 2017 and 2025, I built a circular-economy electronics business from a bare concrete shell into a two-site, 10-person operation serving 10,000 customers. I was the sole technical architect across the full stack: custom Odoo ERP modules with role-based access control, a production web scraping pipeline handling 8,000+ device models, a multi-variable pricing engine, CI/CD deployment via GitHub to a GCP Ubuntu server, PostgreSQL administration, and a WooCommerce platform with live bidirectional sync to Odoo.
The domain was consumer electronics. The underlying discipline, building and maintaining complex systems under real operational constraints, was not that different from engineering work.
Inside the ESA ecosystem
From 2023 to 2024, I was embedded within the ESA Business Incubation Centre Wallonia programme at IDELUX, supporting deep-tech startups applying space technologies to commercial markets.
The portfolio I followed included a reaction wheel bearing cage redesign that significantly reduces fatigue-driven failure in satellite AOCS systems; a clean pyrotechnic material that leaves no surface deposit after separation events, directly applicable to stage separation and explosive bolt applications; and a miniaturised cryptographic IC using electron noise for true random number generation, enabling reliable embedded security in small satellites and handheld hardware. Following these companies required understanding both the underlying engineering and the commercialisation pathway within the ESA framework.
What this blog is
secondstage.spaceis a technical log aimed at practitioners. The topics are MBSE and SysML modelling in Capella, structural analysis with ANSYS and Nastran/Femap, ECSS standards worked through concrete examples, mission analysis, and systems engineering methodology grounded in the INCOSE framework. The underlying thread across all of it is systems thinking applied to real engineering problems, or a 1-metre robotic observatory built from scratch.
The telescope project at moltenlight.space is just getting started. The engineering is being worked out, the documentation will follow each phase as it happens.