Project Calico Reflection

What is Calico?

Calico was a high-altitude balloon mission. I led the software orchestration after the previous lead stepped down. My role involved redistributing tasks, debugging sensors, and managing system integration. We spent many nights in the lab preparing for an after-dark flight, eventually reaching the launch phase.

What Calico taught me

The mission failed twenty minutes after takeoff. We lost all communication and never recovered the hardware. This experience taught me that leadership is not about personal output or doing the most work. By centralizing the technical responsibilities, I had created a fragile system that could not withstand a critical point of failure.

Now What

As Vice President of CubeCats, I apply these lessons by focusing on structural resilience. I mentor the current cohort on clear task ownership and distributed knowledge. I want to ensure the team is built to succeed even when individual members are unavailable, creating a more robust foundation for our future missions.

Being a Global Citizen Scholar means recognizing that failure is a critical part of learning. I have realized that space does not care about your plans. It only cares about what works. This perspective requires a commitment to technical rigor and the resilience to treat setbacks as data for improvement rather than reasons for defeat.