CargoX, space station cargo management
National Space Hackathon, IIT Delhi × ISRO · 2025
2nd place among 5,000+ participants, team Monospace
Abstract
Stowage on a space station is a constrained placement problem. Volume is fixed, crew time is expensive, and an item buried behind three others has effectively been lost. CargoX plans placement and rearrangement through 3D bin packing under priority-based heuristics, and exposes the whole thing as an API so the state of the station can be queried, simulated forward, and audited.
The problem
Cargo arrives and departs continuously, and each transfer changes what is reachable. A placement that is optimal for volume alone can bury a frequently needed item behind low-priority ones, which costs crew time, the one resource that cannot be resupplied.
What it does
Placement optimizes across containers and zones under item priority and preferred zone. Retrieval accounts for what has to be moved to reach a target and tracks who did it. Rearrangement relocates low-priority items to recover space before it runs out.
Waste handling, time simulation for predicting future state, import and export of system state, and a logging trail round it out. Time simulation matters because the question is not only where an item goes today but whether that choice is still sound after the next three resupply cycles.
Implementation
A FastAPI backend with a web frontend, containerized so the whole system comes up with a single compose command and ingests the container and item manifests as CSV.