Spacebourne Names Rajat Choudhary Winner of the Spring 2026 Delta-V Capstone Award

Spacebourne is proud to recognize Rajat Choudhary as the recipient of the Spring 2026 Delta-V Capstone Award, presented to the Scholar whose Grant Research Sprint delivered the strongest, most decision-ready work of the cohort.

Rajat's assignment was to map the funding landscape available to Spacebourne and turn that map into something the leadership team could act on immediately. He delivered exactly that. His research led with a Bottom Line Up Front summary that gave the team a clear path forward from the first paragraph, and he scored every solicitation against a consistent set of criteria. Rather than quietly setting aside the opportunities that did not qualify, he documented them in full, a choice that reflects the kind of intellectual honesty Spacebourne looks for in every Scholar. He also flagged SAM.gov registration lead time as what he called "the silent killer" of grant timelines, a catch that will save future teams real time. Beyond the assigned scope, he pulled in DIU and the SDA BAA on his own initiative, and the one open verification step in his report was scoped with an honest confidence rating rather than glossed over.

"Winning meant the work landed where it was supposed to land," Rajat said. "The Delta-V sprint pushed me to be honest about what funding pathways were real and which were dead ends, and that kind of discipline transfers to everything I want to build next."

Rajat is a Computer Science major at UC Irvine, concentrating in Intelligent Systems with a minor in Statistics, and is expected to graduate in December 2026. He has earned a spot on the Dean's Honor List for seven consecutive quarters. He grew up in Jaipur, India, where he attended Teoler High School, and he says the Delta-V sprint was the first project he worked on where the output directly informed how a real company would spend its time and money.

His path to Spacebourne runs through hands-on experience across AI and business analysis. He spent the summer of 2025 as an AI/ML Intern at Adani Green Energy, trained as an AI Software Engineer through the TensaX AI Academy from 2023 to 2024, and worked as a Business Analyst Intern at ICICI Prudential in 2023. Outside of coursework, most of his time goes toward building and shipping his own side projects.

Rajat's next step is a Software Engineering internship at Built By The Trades starting in the summer of 2026, where he will work on AI product development.

Congratulations to Rajat on a well-earned award. Spacebourne's Delta-V Scholar Program exists to give rising engineers and analysts real problems with real stakes, and Rajat's work is a model of what that looks like when it is done right.