They’re Building the “Safety Layer” for Space and It Could Change the Future of Humanity | Ep 314 with Minh Nguyen & John Avera Co-Founders of xOrbita

0:04Daniel Robbins:So Minh and John, like my brain, I was trying to understand what you all are doing. I went onto your LinkedIn page and I have to say I understood 5 % of it. But the 5 % that I understood, my mind was blown. And the 95 % that I did not understand, I wouldn't understand. And I mean like space, debris. How I have so many questions about how does one even get into the business of space debris? But before we go into that, everyone I know is talking about space. Like space is the new business frontier, which I find very fascinating. Can either of you or both talk about why in 2026 is everybody now looking at space?

0:51All right.

0:51Minh Nguyen:So I'll take the start of that. And it's important because the reason why we exist or the reason why we are solving this issue is a part of the reason why everyone is talking about space right now. Because right now, space is at a point where it's easy to get into it. You know, we've had the foundational layers being built upon us year by year, decade by decade with companies like SpaceX launching the rockets every single day. There's satellites that are being able to be launched for fractions of the cost that they were way back in the day. We've got student groups now that are launching satellites.

1:26Minh Nguyen:We have national programs that let high schoolers put satellites into space. Like that's something crazy that is being said like in today's world that everyone just accepts normally. um but in that there's an over congestion of satellite particles debris and objects being

1:47John Avera:centered in space so when you think about why are people all talking about space right now is

1:55Minh Nguyen:because everyone's realizing that the infinite possibilities that are able to be extracted from the environment are so easy to get into and so easy to tap into that it's just a no-brainer to get into the situation.

2:09John Avera:I can add to that. I mean, let's think about the global space economy hit$613 billion last year, right? The World Economic Forum and McKinsey, they project that it's heading to$1.8 trillion by 2035. That's tripling in about a decade. and 78 % of that is commercial. This isn't just government spending anymore, right? This is private capital, commercial operators, broadband cancellations, earth observation companies, all building real business in orbit. But here's the thing that nobody's talking about. All that value is sitting in an environment that's getting more dangerous every day or risky. I use the term risky more than anything.

2:54John Avera:There are over 30 ,000 tracked objects in orbit and hundreds of thousands of debris, smaller debris, from 10 centimeters, which is about the size of a grapefruit, to one centimeter, which is about the size of a blueberry, that ground-based sensors can't see it. And so any one of those can destroy a satellite worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So we're building a trillion-dollar industry on an infrastructure that we can't fully protect yet.

3:23Daniel Robbins:I mean, this is incredible. Like you're talking 600 billion now. I didn't even know to now over, you know, maybe 3Xing to 1.8 trillion. And I imagine if we're putting, if it's possible to put data centers in space, which I would imagine a data center is very large, if that's possible to do. And there's a lot of debris that's happening. How? Okay. So I think there's a lot of people and I think they call this the blue ocean, by the way. I don't know if you've heard this in business. as well. So the space is almost like our new blue ocean, right? Not a lot of players, but a lot of opportunity. So when you both looked at this as like, okay, there's a big opportunity in space, the final frontier.

4:06Daniel Robbins:How did you then go to, let's look at debris?

4:11Minh Nguyen:All right. So I'll take this one. I actually, starting X Orbital was a lot of a solo student student academic thing. So I'm still in high school right now. And whenever I first wanted to do space things, for me, it was largely academic based because I'm, you know, I'm in high school, I want to end off my high school year with some cool research, you know, get into a good university. But I dug into it deeper, right? Because I was shifting through so many different ideas within, this vast ocean, the way that you describe it for the ocean of the amount of ideas and opportunities you could take in space.

4:51Minh Nguyen:Before this, I had taken two projects, one in asteroid mining and then one in deep space. Those are two completely unrelated things, but I wanted to do them because space is awesome. But when I started to try and really work on these solutions long term, I hit like a very big wall or a very big fear section because I came across this one article of a Chinese university group that was launching their own satellite. And just a year after they launched the satellite that they had spent their entire university time on, it had gotten defunct. And the reason why it got defunct is because this piece of debris particle had hit the satellite and basically made the practical application for it unusable.

5:37Minh Nguyen:Because even if the debris was just maybe a centimeter in diameter and it didn't cause this massive rupture that people talk about, it caused just enough damage to where all of that effort, all of the money spent and all of everyone's time was useless. So when I thought about it, I was like, in years time that could be me that could be my mission that could be my friend's mission that could be like my family's mission if anyone else wants to get into space so I thought I want to try and solve this issue um but looking at the companies that were doing it and trying to you know tailor my life around getting a good university degree having good projects so that I could work at one of these companies, I thought these companies are also working too slow.

6:33Minh Nguyen:The horizon that I saw for space debris was that the problem was not going to get solved in the time where I thought that it would be useful enough. The issue is growing exponentially. You've heard about doomsday scenarios like the Kessler syndrome and with now an insane upramp of the amount of satellites and objects in orbit, we need the issue to be solved as quickly as possible. And at that point, I decided I need to create a company around this. And that's how X-Overtis started.

7:08Daniel Robbins:Wow. I mean, I don't know what I was doing in high school, but I definitely was not solving space problems. And I love that. I mean, because I think there's always a misconception about generations. Like every generation says generations ago, we're lazy, right? It always is like, or, or generations above say generations below or X, Y, Z. But the fact that you wanted to solve this major problem. And then John, how did you come on board?

7:34John Avera:Well, I'll tell you, I was just cruising around looking at, you know, quantum computing was kind of a new thing. And so I was doing a search on quantum and I saw an article that Min had written about a spectrometer, quantum dot spectrometer. But on the title, I just saw quantum, and then I saw space. I said, well, this looks cool. We'll take a look at that. And I started reading through it, and it was well-written. It was a lit article on the spectrometer, and I started thinking, wait a minute, this is sensors. This is shortwave IR. I know a little bit about this. And he's trying to detect things.

8:05John Avera:I know a little bit about that. I worked in the Air Command Federal Laboratory. It used to be known as the U2 Federal Laboratory, where we were doing just this. And I was part of that team that put AI on a weapon system for the first time. And we were doing detections from the edge. We were doing this back in 2019. And so I said, you know, I think I can help here. Because the very bottom of his page said, do you want to help build this with us? Subtil to that effect. And I was like, yes, I do. Yes, I do. Because I think I know how to help. I think I can help him with this. And so we started talking.

8:44John Avera:And he got excited because I was like, here's how we're going to do it. He's like, John, how would you do it? And I said, well, let me explain to you. And I started getting technical details that make most people go to sleep. But I was like, I think we can do this. I think we can build enough of this to gain, get attention. And so that's how I got involved. And then it started transitioning from there.

9:02Daniel Robbins:So when you think about the hurdles, you're doing something that I'm just going to say is newer than maybe what most are thinking about compared to other industries, right? Maybe people have been thinking about it for years, but probably not maybe decades and decades of how to solve the problem. So you're going to something that it's also obviously not something that you can touch and feel right here. I mean, it's in space. What are some of the hurdles that you've had to overcome because of that?

9:31Minh Nguyen:So we're going to hit it like two pronged. I'll talk the industry facing ones and then he'll talk about the technical details that we've had. So the SSA industry is what we like to define ourselves in, space situational awareness. That's the whole system of tracking, analyzing debris, and making satellites move out of the way of it. It has a really bad look on. There's a really bad look on the SSA industry because it's extremely inefficient. I talked to you before about how I personally thought that those companies currently working on the issue were not doing a good enough job. Well, the whole space industry thinks so as well, because even if they are a necessary component and a majority of satellites use them, a majority of satellites don't actually listen to the behaviors that space traffic management systems are giving them because they're just losing them more than they're giving them in the benefit of.

10:25Minh Nguyen:So most satellite companies would rather actually take the risk as opposed to both buying a management system and spending their own propulsion time on using it. Because that's the real issue here. Everyone brings out the big numbers, right? Like there's 120 million estimated debris particles in space. And we've tracked 40 ,000 of them. It sounds like a big number, but that's 0.04%. And people think that's the big issue, but it isn't. Spatially, between the 10 centimeter debris particles and the one centimeter debris particles, their actual density is like 50-50. So adding more data wouldn't exactly solve the issue.

11:11Minh Nguyen:And you'd think it would solve the issue. But why isn't there other companies already doing it if it was the issue? the issue to me throughout you know talking to actual satellite operators talking to people that are also trying to do data centers in space is that it's not giving them the full potential of the practical application of their satellite let's use starlink for an example right we like to bring in starlink to the conversation because when i say majority of satellite operators use SSA tools, it's just Starlink. They're the only ones that are capable of affording it. They've made a total of 300 ,000 maneuvers in 2025.

11:54Minh Nguyen:They have around 7 ,000 satellites generating nearly$8 billion in revenue. If we took every single satellite that Starlink had, and we extended their lifetime to as long as they could physically live, like their hardware could physically live, it would be around like seven to eight years. But why are they capping their lifetime at five years? It's a really odd question of mine. So if it's not the hardware, if it's not the actual satellite bus, then what is it? It was the propulsion issue actually, because whenever they use a collision avoidance system, you see a piece of space coming at you and you have to move the way, every time you do that, you're using a little bit of the small reserves of propulsion that you have or fuel that you have aboard your satellite.

12:46Minh Nguyen:And the amount of that that you can use throughout your lifetime is what we call delta V. And as you use that delta V, inherently, your satellite is not going to live as long. And we've calculated that based off the amount of debris that's being picked up and the amount of maneuvers that's being picked up, we're losing around 30 % of operational lifetime just off of doing that collision avoidance. So that's why satellite operators are like, hey, I don't want to do this because especially on the frontier of data centers in space, they want their satellite to live as long as physically possible.

13:28Minh Nguyen:It's not an iterative system like starlink or spacex can do people need to preserve the work time and money that they put into every single satellite in space i can tell you um we're building what we're doing

13:41John Avera:is we're building an intelligence first space situational awareness you know right now all they got is that they're looking from the ground up through the atmosphere we're looking we're talking about putting sensors into orbit but on small affordable cheap size right and we paired than with AI that doesn't just process data, it learns from it. And it's going to continue to learn from it, right? Each observation of the HTC system is smarter. And that's totally different from legacy SSA, which is essentially static right now. You build a radar, you point it to the sky, and it gives you the same capability from day one that it does from day one in the 1000.

14:21John Avera:You know, our system is compound. The more data ingests from detections, are better against at finding the things that nobody can see. And turn those detections to real-time collision avoidance recommendations that satellite operators can act on immediately. So I'm seeing you real-time. I process it there. I'm not sending data down to the ground. I'm processing on the edge. And now I've turned data into intelligence. And now I need to let know who needs to know. And not just say I know what I've found, but give them recommendations. give them a maneuver recommendation if they need to make it. That's how our approach is different beyond just the AI, its information density.

15:07John Avera:A lot of companies in space, they're taking a brute force approach. They're going to do massive sensor fleets for coverage. We're achieving comparable global coverage with roughly a six of the size of the fleet to our licensed sensor technology and learning architectures. We have an architecture that's designed to be flexible and learning, right? And this isn't just concept. We've got a working system running, in the end, on-flight representation edge hardware. And the same processes that could fly in space, it processes sensory imaging. It could detect the objects, propagate the orbits. This is important.

15:44John Avera:Calculate the collision probabilities, and then recommend maneuvers. And that's our MVP, and that's what we essentially got running today.

15:52Daniel Robbins:Amazing. So what do you see the benefit is? Obviously, besides the biggest benefit here, which I understand is the less maneuvers or better maneuvers, more information, the less fuel they use, the longer they can stay in space. obviously you're spending billions of dollars on a hundreds of million dollars on a satellite the longer you can have it operate you know you could you know cut in half the cost of then having to send another one up and obviously i'm sure every time you send a satellite up there's possibility the satellite may not even make it to space something might happen and it's going to be a big cost what do you see the data that you could then use besides this long term where do you like what kind of data do you think you could get?

16:37Daniel Robbins:Or what can you use the data for? Or are you thinking about this now?

16:41Minh Nguyen:Right? Yeah. So the obvious next steps are two different things. First, it's active debris removal. And second, it's active debris recycling. Monitoring is a very small step in the full scale of actually solving the issue. Now we all we always think like we're solving the tracking issue. Now there's a bunch of companies popping up, like trans astro shifted their model from like asteroid mining to like a debris capture with like a debris capture bag but we're not even there yet so for us we're thinking about it in this system and we can work through through the system into multiple hoops constantly being there for every single step of solving the debris issue so right now we're at monitoring debris and collision avoidance we can get good at collision avoidance but i am no i am in no way saying that once we get good collision avoidance, that that's going to be the end of it.

17:32Minh Nguyen:Because even then, you reduce, let's say, maybe 75 % of your unnecessary collision avoidances, you're still losing maybe three or four months of operational lifetime. That can convert to millions of dollars of revenue loss. That can maybe even convert to a lot of actual lives being lost in the process. I'll explain that a little bit here because there's a realization here that we don't just use satellites for our own little quality of life and benefits. It's not just like we get data centers in space and then we have lower latency and processing on AI tools. It's not like we get satellites in space and now we have better internet.

18:15Minh Nguyen:It's we have satellites in space, but we have satellites in to doing things like sensing fires, sensing emergency contacts and stuff like that. Once those are down or once those have maybe three or four months of lifetime shave off of them, that could be the difference of something major happening within orbit or even happening down here on Earth. So the first step is monitoring, having better collision avoidance. The second step from there is once we have reliable enough data, then we can start sending up satellites or thinking about having those companies that are being built right now send up satellites to capture the debris.

18:57Minh Nguyen:And from there, then we can maybe think about, okay, we have the debris, we have custody over the debris. Now can we actually do something with it, make it useful back to humanity, not just throw it away and have space being called, everyone says, a loss leader, an economic loss leader because we're always losing economic value and losing money for the sake of science, right?

19:20John Avera:You know, I can see even in the longer term, Exorba becoming infrastructure, the entire industry even relies on. You think about operators, launch providers, insurers, regulators, you know, as space commercializes further and more nations or businesses, global businesses become space-faring, there's an enormous need for trusted operational or operatable safety data. And so, you know, in the long term, we want to be the backbone of that. I like the point that men brought in about, you know, you think about what roughly runs through space today, GPS. You know, if the U.S. GPS system went down, did a little math on it.

20:01John Avera:It's estimated it suggests it would cost about a billion dollars a day, you know. Weather forecasters, disaster response. I come from disaster recovery. I'd spent many years in the National Guard. Broadband for rural, underserved communities, and crop monitoring. And I spent time in financial, in the fintech world, financial transaction timing, as well as supply chain logistics. So space isn't inspirational anymore, right? It's critical infrastructure. And it's only become even more essential. So that's why this safety, I see this as big safety data, big future.

20:38Daniel Robbins:is i'm fascinated we had another guest on who was talking about using uh space matter to solve hacking of quantum computing and they were explaining to me about space matter and and such and i thought entropy and i thought it was very i mean i'm really fascinated with the future of space i'm curious the two of you you know irregardless of x orbital like not not a business question more of a personal question how do you what do you think the future is when we look at space space travel right interplanetary maybe setting i don't can we really live on the moon or mars like how do you see the future of all this going not necessarily nothing related to exorbit just in general like if you think a hundred years 200 years could we be like star

21:31Minh Nguyen:track just floating around space full time so i like this question because when you think about exorbita and when you talk about exorbitant like when you pitch the the actual idea and you talk about it for months and months and months of time over like talking to investors talking to satellite operators it's a lot of like fear it's a lot of like looking at the problem of things and saying like hey we need to solve this and it's it's very uncomfortable that we have to get down to that truth because you know we do have to solve the issue but i like these questions because really from the start of this, I'm not a pessimist.

22:04Minh Nguyen:I don't look at space and I see the issue and that's all I focus on. I am an optimist. I like looking at space and thinking like, these are all of the amazing things that we can do. And for me, I'm not looking here on earth. I'm not looking here on Leo, but I know that's what we need to start with. I'm looking like far out deep space, asteroid mining. I mentioned before, that's what I wanted to work on before this, but I understood there are steps that we need to do before we can get to there. So what I would like to see, at least in my lifetime, well, I hope it happens in my lifetime. If it doesn't, then that would be pretty sad.