Ep. 108 Federal IT and Collisions in Space

Everyone who has watched everything from Star Wars to Star Trek has never encountered some of the problems we see in space today: collisions and space junk.  It just doesn’t make for a good story on the big screen.

However, the reality is that there will be 30,000 satellites launched before 2030 and we are encountering challenges in what is called situational awareness.  In this application, situational awareness is the concept that a satellite must know where it is heading, and whether other objects in space may be on a collision course.

This is such a complex problem that companies like Kahan Space have had to take advantage of technology like cloud computing and artificial intelligence to make space exploration safe.

Today, we sat down with Araz Feyzi, one of the co-founders of a company called Kahan Space.  The problem that is solved is simple to describe, but incredibly complex to solve space situational awareness.

During the interview, Araz gave a great explanation of the problem. For example, on the high seas, there is international law that has been established if there is an incident.

However, in outer space, there are no rules of engagement.  If a satellite is heading towards an American satellite, there is no law or regulation to tell the satellite operators what to do.

This is such a complicated problem that Kahan Space was launched to enable satellite operators to be able to predict trajectories.  The cloud’s ability to store and compute must be utilized to have a better outcome when there is an incident.

The term Araz uses is the popular “orchestrate.”  Normally used for terrestrial data processing, it is increasingly being used for analysis of complicated satellite patterns. 

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