7 days at CERN. One planetary problem.

During the CERN IdeaSquare i2Planet programme, my team and I spent 7 days on one urgent challenge: orbital sustainability. Low Earth Orbit is increasingly congested — and at ~28,000 km/h, even a small fragment can destroy an operational satellite.
- Design three future scenarios
- Reduce satellite numbers by 55–66%
- Preserve critical infrastructure
- Prevent cascading collision risks
- Build both qualitative and quantitative models
We built optimisation models, evaluated real debris-removal technologies, assessed governance and ethical trade-offs and compared cost scalability — and on the final day presented a unified planetary infrastructure strategy.
CERN didn't just teach science. It taught responsibility at planetary scale.
