Siddharth Talesra is a systems engineer from Jodhpur, Rajasthan, who has spent his working life building systems that are not allowed to fail.

He studied computer science at IIT Jodhpur, then spent five years at Pioneer Power Systems designing solar and wind power plants of up to 400 megawatts, first as a manager and then as head designer.

In 2021 he founded Standard Auxiliary (StdAux), a space-tech startup working on the in-orbit servicing of satellites. There he and a small team built a star tracker that can tell which way a spacecraft is pointing from a single photograph of the stars, and designed vision-based navigation for spacecraft that must approach one another in orbit. It is the same kind of work Arjun Verma does in this book.

Periapsis grew out of those years: out of orbital mechanics and Kalman filters, and out of the question of what an engineer owes to the things he cannot measure.