He’s building the brain of the space station of tomorrow
On co-op, Siddarth Dayasagar played a leading role in helping improve Space Data Inc.’s Space Station OS, an open source operating system designed for space stations.
Siddarth Dayasagar watched his screen with excitement.
He didn’t know that his career path would crystallize after he clicked on a technical primer on YouTube describing NASA’s Perseverance rover, the six-wheeled specialized mobile vehicle designed to traverse Mars.
Yet something awoke inside him as he learned about Perseverance’s 293-million-mile journey to the red planet.
“Watching Perseverance functioning and how it [was going] to land on Mars really fascinated me,” Dayasagar recalled thinking after watching the video, which had been uploaded by former NASA engineer Mark Rober.
The video was posted days before Perseverance successfully landed on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. Rober worked on Perseverance’s predecessor, Curiosity.
Dayasagar’s career in space robotics can be traced back to that moment. And now he can say he’s helped make meaningful contributions to the industry.
This fall, the second-year robotics graduate student completed a co-op at Space Data Inc., a Japanese-based space technology company working in artificial intelligence, robotics and digital twin technologies, software that recreates physical spaces in 3D simulations.
While on the co-op, Dayasagar played a leading role in helping improve the company’s Space Station OS, an open source operating system project designed for space stations.
Think of it like Google’s open source software platform, Android. But instead of powering phones, Space Station OS one day could power massive orbital space stations similar to the International Space Station, Dayasagar explained.
The company hopes that by developing a standardized platform, countries around the globe can take advantage of it. That type of unity and open collaboration could be useful for speeding up software development, removing fragmentation and improving accessibility.
“If we have a standardized operating system, then we can make sure during any emergency across all space stations, you’ll have a good manual that you can use to mitigate those challenges,” he said.
One of Dayasagar’s roles during his co-op was to help develop, support and test the OS’s subsystems used to control a space station’s life support infrastructure, electrical power systems, thermal controls, guidance and navigation capabilities.
Since Space Station OS is still new and isn’t connected to specific pieces of hardware, Dayasagar ran the operating system through a series of disaster scenarios using the company’s still-in-development simulation software.
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“Let’s say your space station’s vents fail,” he said while describing a potential disaster scenario. “Your vents have been closed and they’re not opened at a particular time and carbon dioxide concentrations have increased inside the space station. Astronauts might faint. … Space Station OS provides an emergency response. It tries to signal to the astronauts that ‘Your vents have been closed. Please see if you can repair those vents.’”
Dayasagar had experience working on Space Station OS even before starting his co-op. In 2024, he connected directly with the company’s executive officer of administration strategy, Hiroaki Kato, on LinkedIn, wanting to support its development.
What immediately stood out, Kato told Northeastern Global News, was Dayasagar’s “genuine curiosity and his willingness to engage with a complex, unfinished system rather than looking for a predefined task.”
“He asked thoughtful questions, showed a strong learning mindset, and demonstrated the ability to quickly understand the broader context of space systems rather than focusing only on isolated technical details,” he added.
After working as a contributor on the side for more than a year, Dayasagar landed his co-op at the company with Kato’s help.
“I decided to support Siddarth’s co-op because he showed both technical capability and maturity in how he approached real engineering problems,” he said. “He was not simply interested in learning tools; he wanted to understand why systems are designed the way they are and how different subsystems interact. This mindset is essential in space robotics, where reliability, integration and long-term thinking matter as much as coding skills.”
But Dayasagar didn’t exclusively just work on Space Station OS during his co-op. During the second half, he also developed software for one of the company’s quadrapred robots designed to be used in disaster and rescue operations.
Dayasanager had no experience in this domain and had the opportunity to work for the first time with Nvidia’s robot simulation platform Issac Sim, which is also open source.
Using the company’s digital replica of Tokyo, where they simulate earthquake and tsunami events, Dayasanagar worked on improving the robot’s locomotion and navigation capabilities.
While the company is still in the early stages of developing the robot, Dayasanager said it could one day be a critical tool in saving people’s lives.
“Let’s say we have an earthquake, and we don’t know where humans are trapped inside the building, we’d send in the quadruped robot along with drones. First the drones scan the environment to locate any heat signatures and then they send in the quadruped robot, letting them know that a human is trapped inside this building and he needs immediate relief.”
To be fair, both projects are still far out from being commercially ready, the Space Station OS operating system being the more ambitious undertaking.
However, he said he knows he’ll get emotional seeing the projects finally reach their full potential.
“That would be [a full circle] moment for me,” he said. “Just like I watched Mark Rober cry when Curiosity landed on Mars. I’ll cry when Space Station OS is finally an end product on a space station.”
