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[00:01]
Narrator
Picture a single road looping the entire planet. No lanes, no exits, no stoplights. There's one car on the road, then a few more cars. Easy to track, easy to predict. Then on ramps, open everywhere, all at once, more cars merge on, then more. None of these cars have brakes. They have no way off the loop and nobody directing traffic. Then a single crash. But the wreckage doesn't sit on the shoulder waiting for a tow truck. It explodes into a thousand new pieces with nowhere to go. Because every one of these cars was moving at 17,000 miles an hour. This is space. With objects fast enough to cross the United states in under 10 minutes and 140 million pieces of debris in its orbit, more objects present than people living in the country of Japan.
[01:11]
Philip Rittmuller
On February 10, 2009, somewhere in orbit above Siberia, a Russian military satellite collided
[01:17]
Luke Peterson
with an American communications satellite. At the moment of collision, each satellite was traveling nearly 36,000 kilometers per hour.
[01:26]
Narrator
And it's not just crowded, it's contested.
[01:30]
Luke Peterson
This is an active, messy, military, commercial, public, private war zone that all of our economy runs through. And that is a hard problem to ensure the safety and reliability of a
[01:45]
Narrator
place where nations are watching each other, where satellites can be tracked, targeted, jammed, or deceived. How do we understand what's happening there? And how do we learn to operate in a domain that's moving too fast for the old way of watching it? At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one answer is being developed inside a mission operations center. One built for a space age that's no longer empty. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab. Your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow. Today, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real world challenges in science, engineering, business or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab. Right now, positions are open for a senior guidance, navigation and controls engineer and a senior business operations specialist. These are just a few of the more than 100 exciting roles available at Lawrence Livermore. You'll work on projects that matter, from national security to cutting edge scientific advancements. Join a team that values innovation, collaboration and professional growth. Explore opportunities@llnl.gov careers where your next career moves could make history. For most of human history, space was something distant. We looked up at a dark canvas that felt distant enough to belong more to imagination than everyday life. Wow. Then we learned how to reach it. You are hearing the actual signals Transmitted by the earth circling satellite, One of the great scientific feats of the age. It gave added incentive to the development of Earth orbiting satellites for photo reconnaissance. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space. We have a liftoff 32 minutes past the hour. We sent up rockets, satellites, telescopes, instruments, machines built to see farther and navigate better. Now space is woven into daily life in ways most of us hardly notice.
[04:38]
Luke Peterson
I used a maps app to get directions to come here, and none of that would work without space.
[04:44]
Narrator
Luke Peterson is the associate program leader for data science in Livermore's space program.
[04:50]
Luke Peterson
When I order a package to get delivered, the logistics, routing, all of that, that all goes through space. Our financial system depends upon space.
[04:58]
Narrator
What happens when space stops being a backdrop and becomes a pressure point? When the same domain carrying our maps, money, and communications starts changing faster than the people watching it can respond?
[05:11]
Luke Peterson
So this is very, very tough how you deal with it. It's a hard national security problem, but it's one where we would like to maintain freedom of movement, freedom of communications. We would like our military to be able to continue to use space as it sees fit.
[05:24]
Narrator
Philip Rittmuller is a lead engineer at Lawrence Livermore and the principal investigator who helped build a system designed to navigate this problem.
[05:33]
Philip Rittmuller
There's an equivalence to Moore's law that states every 18 months, the processing power of chips will double. Well, there's an equivalent for space where every two years, the number of objects in space is doubling.
[05:48]
Luke Peterson
A secure, stable, and accessible space domain is crucial.
[05:53]
Philip Rittmuller
As challenges to the United States and
[05:56]
Luke Peterson
our allies, Space capabilities continue to increase.
[05:59]
Philip Rittmuller
It's happening really fast. It's a supply and demand thing because the number of space objects doubling every two years means there's a lot more people who need operations centers. But operations centers usually are manned by people, so they can't scale as fast as the rest of the industry.
[06:16]
Narrator
Philip experienced the problem firsthand. It's what his team was faced with when integrating systems operations for the Pandora spacecraft mission.
[06:26]
Philip Rittmuller
As we were developing that, we were trying to find mission operations centers, and the cost of it was so high, we're thinking this is something we can do ourselves for our missions, which are small and experimental. We don't want to have some big fancy operations center. We can just have an operations here on the lab with just the capabilities that we need, and it'll be much less expensive.
[06:47]
Narrator
That idea became StarMock, the satellite telescope,
[06:51]
Philip Rittmuller
aerial drone and remote sensing mission operations center, or starmock for short.
[06:56]
Narrator
Starmak gives Lawrence Livermore the operational backbone for a new generation of agile, lower cost small satellite missions. The place where experimental spacecraft and payload ideas begin moving toward real mission activity. But StarMak wasn't only built to reduce operational costs.
[07:17]
Luke Peterson
One of the big problems we see in space is there's this desire to move quickly and innovate, but you have this risk of actual operations going on. You're actually flying satellites. So Star Amuk allows us to test new technologies, new ways of doing operations and demonstrating those capabilities to folks that they then are more willing to take on and adopt. So it's bridging that valley of death between how you could change space operations to actually getting it out into the field. And so by having that testbed of StarMak, it lets us test out some of those technologies, break them in a safe space. And it is an extension of the laboratory ethos. But into outer space we like to push the boundary on technology and science and how things could be re envisioned. And so StarMak is like our little hub of what the future of space operations could be.
[08:14]
Narrator
A safe, exploratory place to move fast, break things, and learn how to improve in the process. And last summer they did. In July 2025, a satellite company saw something they didn't expect. One of their satellites was being flooded with commands. Hundreds of them in a single day. Far more than any had ever been designed to receive. But the signal wasn't coming from an adversary. The source. Three interns at Lawrence Livermore.
[08:48]
Luke Peterson
We had been kicking around the idea of introducing a new way of automating satellite tasking. Our current satellites, if they want to take a picture of something, they issue the commands, they send it to somebody else and they said, okay, yes, this is the command we're going to issue the satellite. But it's very like long manual process. And so what that means is that the time between, hey, I have an idea, I want to take a picture of something. And when you actually get that picture can be very, very long.
[09:13]
Narrator
Even in perfect conditions, the request itself would take at least 15 minutes. Then between communication procedures and orbital positioning, the whole process from human to satellite to result could take hours.
[09:26]
Luke Peterson
If we look at the space environment, particularly in the national security arena, waiting a few hours is just too long. If there's a threat coming, you want to know it right away.
[09:35]
Narrator
Starmak asked a few students to spend a summer trying to solve the problem.
[09:40]
Luke Peterson
We gave them the task of interfacing with an existing ground based tasking Telescope network and extending that to the space layer. So the Space Force has an existing automation network for their ground based telescopes doing the problem of space domain awareness. And we said, well, could we just extend that to space?
[10:04]
Narrator
But pointing a satellite in orbit is not the same as pointing pointing ground based telescopes. The students had to write the translation between the two systems. And after three months of concentrated effort, the students changed the time of an automatically tasked picture from a satellite of the International space station from 15 minutes down to 10 seconds.
[10:27]
Luke Peterson
It was so fast that we actually ended up breaking the satellite on orbit because in one day, I remember it, they sent over 700 commands to the satellite and the satellite operators weren't prepared for that. We heard when we showed this to people at a big conference in the fall that the owners of the Space Force ground based telescope system said, oh wow, you did that so fast. We have private companies that have been trying to do this for years.
[10:54]
Narrator
Starmock gave them something most space experiments never get a place to try the idea on real systems, find the breaking point and learn from it. With speed a difficult industry obstacle overcome in a single summer. And in today's space age that speed matters.
[11:13]
Luke Peterson
There are adversaries who realize our dominance in space and they want to overtake it. They want to establish their own rules of the road. They want to establish their own norms. They're being increasingly aggressive out there. And so the space mission is becoming harder and harder and harder.
[11:28]
Narrator
Harder orbit is active and sometimes it's intentionally disrupted.
[11:35]
Luke Peterson
The Space Force and other Pentagon agencies will need to respond to the growing
[11:38]
Philip Rittmuller
threat of anti satellite capabilities.
[11:40]
Luke Peterson
A new report says Russia and China
[11:42]
Philip Rittmuller
are making advances in counter space weapons
[11:44]
Luke Peterson
faster than the US is improving its defenses.
[11:53]
Narrator
Looking for a career that challenges and inspires, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a power grid dynamics engineer and a transmission grid engineer, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative mission driven environment. Discover Open positions@llnl.gov careers where big ideas come to life.
[12:48]
Luke Peterson
Our space program really Got started after 2007 Anti Satellite Test by China where they blew up a satellite in orbit and it created a whole bunch of debris.
[12:57]
Narrator
According to US government officials, after three
[13:00]
Luke Peterson
misses, China succeeded in shooting down one
[13:03]
Narrator
of its own aging weather satellites with a medium range ballistic missile fired from the ground.
[13:09]
Luke Peterson
So our things in space are not necessarily immune. Our adversaries could attack it.
[13:13]
Narrator
There are countries who are pursuing very aggressive, very impressive, impressive counter space Capabilities. But an attack on a satellite doesn't have to mean an explosion.
[13:22]
Philip Rittmuller
An adversary might want to interfere with the mission. It could be jamming your spacecraft. Or maybe they want to take a picture of your spacecraft and you don't want them to know what's on your spacecraft. You could teach an agent how to avoid that situation.
[13:34]
Narrator
To make that kind of autonomy possible, software has to be trained and tested far before it's launched into orbit. That's the kind of work Star starmock is trying to make possible.
[13:44]
Philip Rittmuller
As you're developing your satellite and trying to decide if it works. We have the electrostatic discharge or ESD compatible room where we can put in our flight processors and our sensors and make sure everything talks and works together and simulate the environment it will be in using HPC high performance computing. So we can test things out to make sure our hardware works, test the sequence of commands we might want to do, run through that, and then when we're in actual operations, things will go much more smoothly because we tested it all.
[14:17]
Narrator
This is what the team calls hardware in the loop testing. In that room, they can practice the whole mission before launching.
[14:25]
Philip Rittmuller
So you could be running your flight processor with all the software that's going to run on the spacecraft and it decides when to do a burn to change its orbit. You can simulate that whole process. I want to do a turn and then a burn in this direction that goes out to the hpc, which is running a simulation. And the simulation would say, okay, this is how your orbit would change. Oh, this is where you are now. And if you're looking in the direction you told us to look, you're going to see this.
[14:56]
Narrator
Simulate the environment isn't just a metaphor. Starmock sits by behind the lab's firewall, connected to the computing power needed to recreate the world a satellite will face once it's in orbit. Inside that simulated world, engineers can test the satellite's brain. Before the satellite ever leaves the ground, they can give it problems, watch how it responds, and refine the way it makes decisions. One of the tools that makes this possible is called sapi, or Space Situational Awareness in Python, which was developed by ldrd, or Lab Directed Development, we wrote
[15:34]
Luke Peterson
this code that can run efficiently on high performance computing. And what you can do with that is create scenarios where you have satellites flying around the moon, they can fly around Earth, Jupiter, the drag from the solar wind, all this, like physics is in there. And so you get high accuracy modeling. And if you wanted to teach an AI to fly satellites, you can then give the AI that tool and say, okay, you can try to fly a satellite through, through our simulator, play your little video game and figure out if it crashes. And if it crashes, then change it and figure it out.
[16:08]
Narrator
That kind of simulator only matters if people can actually use it. In space research, many of the tools that model orbits and satellite behavior are expensive proprietary systems. SAPI takes a different approach. Lawrence Livermore made it open source, giving students, researchers and small smaller teams access to high fidelity space modeling software without needing a major commercial license.
[16:33]
Luke Peterson
We open sourced it so it's free for the community, which is a big deal in this area because a lot of the other tools are proprietary and tens of thousands of dollars to run their code. That is actually what we did using our high performance computers. You give an AI this simulation tool and you let it play millions and millions of games and it eventually figures out how to fly satellites.
[16:57]
Narrator
Training that AI takes enormous computing power. Running it once trained takes almost none.
[17:05]
Philip Rittmuller
We would like to develop games using AI and HPC that the Guardians can play to learn how to control a spacecraft and to win engagements. And we could use the starmak for that. You could have two teams. One team of Guardians in one room of the Star Mach, another in another room, and they can play against each other and see what techniques work and what doesn't against the simulation that's being run on the hpc.
[17:31]
Narrator
An entire training happening inside a simulated world. A satellite agent learning how to operate in a place it's never been. Then the trained agent moves onto a flight processor small enough to ride a satellite. That's how a spacecraft might act faster. But if satellites can start acting faster on their own, how does anyone keep track of the autonomous sky?
[17:55]
Luke Peterson
Humans can't keep track of this anymore. It used to be that space domain awareness was a human endeavor. There were 10 or 20 things you had to keep track of. Some operators in the US Military could once a day check in, be like, yep, that thing's still there. Great. You can't do that with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of of objects. And so you have to automate. There's this big desire for automation. But all of the systems are legacy, invented in the Cold War. And many of them are still running horribly old computer languages and on very, very old, old systems. Things in space are described by what's called a TLE or two line element. Why is it two lines? Because it's what the punch cards used. The Space Star Mach allows us to be like, okay, we need to move past Punch cards. But like, how? Because we have all this other stuff we have to keep track of. And our operations are getting harder and harder and harder. There is no space to innovate in this area. If you have a starmak, what you can do is you can prototype these things and be like, hey, actually, here's a way you could automate satellite tasking. We worked it all out. Here's a data schema. It's not based on punch cards anymore.
[19:02]
Narrator
The sky now produces more information than any analyst can hold it with. Once space force alerts, satellite maneuvers, close approaches, breakups. Each one a clue, but rarely the whole story. But there are threads between these pieces. And a Lawrence Livermore student prototype named Supernova was built to connect the dots.
[19:24]
Luke Peterson
Imagine you have a chatbot in front of you, and you can ask it questions about satellites. Hey, has Satellite A, this U.S. satellite, does it have any relation to Satellite B, this Japanese satellite?
[19:38]
Narrator
Ask the question and something assembles on screen in real time in front of you.
[19:43]
Luke Peterson
On the chatbot on your screen is created in real time what looks like a spider web. Or maybe it looks like that guy from the meme of, like, all of the red threads connected behind him. I've stumbled onto a major company conspiracy Mac. How about that for stress on your screen in real time that a conspiracy theory board gets created connecting the US Satellite to the Japanese satellite. And the chatbot comes back and says, yes, actually there is a relation between these two. And there's this other satellite that has made close approaches to each of these independently, months apart. There's this other satellite from China that has actually gone near both of these calculating approach vector. That's the kind of information that an analyst would really like to know. It would take them months and a fair amount of luck to find the connection between US Satellite A and Japanese Satellite B.
[20:37]
Narrator
One alert may only matter because of something that happened months earlier. The future of space operations depends on seeing those connections while there is still time to act. StarMock's new technology is as much about understanding relationships as it is tracking objects. The future of space exploration isn't being built around one tool, one student project, or one mission. It's an entire infrastructure, a place where new ways of operating can be tested before anyone knows exactly what they will become.
[21:11]
Philip Rittmuller
I think of it like this. When DARPA developed the Internet, they didn't know that it was going to enable Google and smartphones and Amazon. They developed this infrastructure, put it out there and, and let super smart people figure out what to do with it. That's what the StarMaker is. We've developed infrastructure and I'm really excited to see where it goes.
[21:30]
Narrator
And it's already reaching beyond the lab. The Space Force is standing up an AI accelerator centered at Stanford, and Livermore is signing on as its mission transition partner. The place where a promising idea from academia gets pushed from ideation into reality.
[21:49]
Philip Rittmuller
I want to put it out there and let this team of super smart people we have here at Lawrence Livermore go tackle new problems and figure out what they want to do with it. Because I am sure that I'm going to be surprised with some ideas that
[22:01]
Narrator
come out of this above our heads. The traffic keeps merging on faster satellites, smarter adversaries, a sky doubling in objects every two years. Whoever learns to fly it, to teach the machines to read the whole crowded lane at once to move in seconds instead of hours will help set the bar for a safer, more secure sky. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating, rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the Follow or Subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real world challenges in science, engineering, business or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab. Right now, positions are open for a senior guidance, navigation and Controls Engineer and a Senior Business Operations Specialist. These are just a few of the more than 100 exciting roles available at Lawrence Livermore. You'll work on projects that matter, from national security to cutting edge scientific advancements. Join a team that values innovation, collaboration and professional growth. Explore opportunities@llnl.gov careers where your next career move could make history.

Summary5 min read

Podcast Summary: Big Ideas Lab – "STARMOC"

Podcast: Big Ideas Lab by Mission.org
Episode Title: STARMOC
Release Date: August 4, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode offers a rare, inside look at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's cutting-edge efforts in space technology, focusing on the STARMOC (Satellite, Telescope, Aerial Drone and Remote Sensing Mission Operations Center) initiative. Through expert interviews and stories, the episode explores the rapidly evolving, crowded, and contested environment of Earth’s orbit, national security challenges, innovations for autonomous space operations, and the pivotal role LLNL’s technological infrastructure is playing in shaping the future of space exploration and defense.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Space as a Crowded and Contested Domain

The episode illustrates the chaos of Earth’s orbit, using a metaphor: "Picture a single road looping the entire planet...None of these cars have brakes." (Narrator, [00:00])
Space is no longer distant or abstract; it is integral to everyday life, powering navigation, logistics, and global finance.
Collisions and risks are real and growing:
- Example: The 2009 collision between a Russian military satellite and an American satellite, both traveling "nearly 36,000 kilometers per hour." (Luke Peterson, [01:17])

2. Exponential Growth and the National Security Dilemma

The number of objects in space doubles every two years—outpacing our ability to monitor and control them. (Philip Rittmuller, [05:33])
- “There’s an equivalent [to] Moore’s law…for space where every two years, the number of objects in space is doubling.” ([05:33])
Operations centers, tasked with monitoring all this activity, cannot keep up with this rate of change through traditional, manual means.

3. Origins and Evolution of STARMOC

Initially conceived to reduce the high cost and complexity of traditional mission operations for small, experimental missions.
- “We can just have an operations here on the lab with just the capabilities that we need, and it’ll be much less expensive.” (Philip Rittmuller, [06:25])
STARMOC enables faster, risk-tolerant testing and operational agility for new satellite missions, acting as a “hub of what the future of space operations could be.” (Luke Peterson, [07:17])

4. Breakthroughs Through Student Innovation

In 2025, intern-led automation efforts reduced the time to task a satellite from 15 minutes to just 10 seconds—a record in the field.
- “After three months...the students changed the time...from 15 minutes down to 10 seconds.” (Narrator, [10:04])
- This pace even broke a commercial satellite by overwhelming it with commands: “They sent over 700 commands to the satellite and the satellite operators weren’t prepared for that.” (Luke Peterson, [10:26])
Demonstrated the value of having a real-world, risk-tolerant testbed for space operations improvements.

5. Responding to Adversaries and New Threats

Described the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test as a pivotal event:
- “Our space program really got started after [the] 2007 Anti Satellite Test by China.” (Luke Peterson, [12:47])
Highlighted the emergence of jamming, surveillance, and "soft" counterspace tactics beyond outright destruction. (Philip Rittmuller, [13:21])

6. Simulating and Training for Autonomous Space Operations

Hardware-in-the-loop testing: Full mission simulations using high-performance computing (HPC) to validate both hardware and software before launch.
- “You can simulate that whole process...with all the software that’s going to run on the spacecraft…make sure everything talks and works together.” (Philip Rittmuller, [14:24])
Development of SAPI (Space Situational Awareness in Python), an open-source, high-fidelity space modeling tool for academia and industry:
- “We open sourced it so it’s free for the community, which is a big deal in this area because a lot of the other tools are proprietary.” (Luke Peterson, [16:33])
- This enables AI agents to learn space operations by playing millions of simulated scenarios.

7. Automation: The Only Way Forward

Human monitoring is no longer sufficient with “tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of objects.” (Luke Peterson, [17:55])
Legacy systems—like the Cold War-era “two line element” (TLE) data—are outdated, calling for innovative data schemas and automated frameworks.

8. Connecting the Dots: The Supernova Prototype

Prototype tool “Supernova” lets analysts visually discover connections between satellites, using real-time data graphs:
- “Imagine you have a chatbot in front of you, and you can ask it questions about satellites…” (Luke Peterson, [19:23])
- The tool assembles “what looks like a spider web” of connections to reveal previously hidden patterns. ([19:43])

9. Building Broad Infrastructure for the Unknown

The true value of STARMOC lies not in single projects, but as an open, adaptable infrastructure enabling rapid innovation, “like when DARPA developed the Internet.” (Philip Rittmuller, [21:10])
Livermore's partnership on AI/space accelerator programs (e.g., with Space Force and Stanford) signals the transition of these ideas from laboratory to national defense.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the overwhelming scale of orbital debris:
- “140 million pieces of debris in its orbit, more objects present than people living in the country of Japan.”
  — Narrator ([00:42])
The pace of space innovation vs. human operations:
- “Operations centers…can’t scale as fast as the rest of the industry.”
  — Philip Rittmuller ([05:58])
Impact of intern innovation:
- “We actually ended up breaking the satellite on orbit because in one day…they sent over 700 commands.”
  — Luke Peterson ([10:26])
On intelligence analysis:
- “It would take [an analyst] months and a fair amount of luck to find the connection between US Satellite A and Japanese Satellite B.”
  — Narrator ([20:15])
On STARMOC’s vision:
- “We’ve developed infrastructure and I’m really excited to see where it goes.”
  — Philip Rittmuller ([21:10])

Timestamps for Key Segments

[00:00] — Introduction: The space debris metaphor and growing congestion
[01:11] — Case Study: Satellite collision, national security implications
[05:33] — Space "Moore's Law" and scaling challenges
[06:47] — Birth of STARMOC and mission operations innovation
[08:47] — Intern breakthrough: Near-instant satellite tasking
[10:26] — "Breaking" the satellite with automation — field impact
[12:47] — The 2007 Chinese ASAT test and the birth of LLNL’s space security focus
[14:16] — Hardware-in-the-loop and high-fidelity simulation
[15:34] — SAPI: Open-source orbital simulation for community/AI
[17:55] — Limitations of legacy monitoring, the need for automation
[19:23] — Supernova: Graph-based, AI-powered space situational analysis
[21:10] — STARMOC as enabling infrastructure, not just a tool

Conclusion

"STARMOC" delivers a compelling exploration of how Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is confronting the exponential growth and complexity of earth’s orbital space. Through real-world examples, technical deep-dives, and stories of innovation, the episode underlines the urgency and promise of new infrastructure like STARMOC and tools like SAPI and Supernova, showing how the future of space—and national security—will be shaped not just by engineers and analysts, but by foundational technologies enabling ideas to move from the lab to orbit at the speed of change.

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Transcript68 lines

[00:01]
Narrator
Picture a single road looping the entire planet. No lanes, no exits, no stoplights. There's one car on the road, then a few more cars. Easy to track, easy to predict. Then on ramps, open everywhere, all at once, more cars merge on, then more. None of these cars have brakes. They have no way off the loop and nobody directing traffic. Then a single crash. But the wreckage doesn't sit on the shoulder waiting for a tow truck. It explodes into a thousand new pieces with nowhere to go. Because every one of these cars was moving at 17,000 miles an hour. This is space. With objects fast enough to cross the United states in under 10 minutes and 140 million pieces of debris in its orbit, more objects present than people living in the country of Japan.
[01:11]
Philip Rittmuller
On February 10, 2009, somewhere in orbit above Siberia, a Russian military satellite collided
[01:17]
Luke Peterson
with an American communications satellite. At the moment of collision, each satellite was traveling nearly 36,000 kilometers per hour.
[01:26]
Narrator
And it's not just crowded, it's contested.
[01:30]
Luke Peterson
This is an active, messy, military, commercial, public, private war zone that all of our economy runs through. And that is a hard problem to ensure the safety and reliability of a
[01:45]
Narrator
place where nations are watching each other, where satellites can be tracked, targeted, jammed, or deceived. How do we understand what's happening there? And how do we learn to operate in a domain that's moving too fast for the old way of watching it? At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one answer is being developed inside a mission operations center. One built for a space age that's no longer empty. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab. Your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow. Today, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real world challenges in science, engineering, business or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab. Right now, positions are open for a senior guidance, navigation and controls engineer and a senior business operations specialist. These are just a few of the more than 100 exciting roles available at Lawrence Livermore. You'll work on projects that matter, from national security to cutting edge scientific advancements. Join a team that values innovation, collaboration and professional growth. Explore opportunities@llnl.gov careers where your next career moves could make history. For most of human history, space was something distant. We looked up at a dark canvas that felt distant enough to belong more to imagination than everyday life. Wow. Then we learned how to reach it. You are hearing the actual signals Transmitted by the earth circling satellite, One of the great scientific feats of the age. It gave added incentive to the development of Earth orbiting satellites for photo reconnaissance. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long range exploration of space. We have a liftoff 32 minutes past the hour. We sent up rockets, satellites, telescopes, instruments, machines built to see farther and navigate better. Now space is woven into daily life in ways most of us hardly notice.
[04:38]
Luke Peterson
I used a maps app to get directions to come here, and none of that would work without space.
[04:44]
Narrator
Luke Peterson is the associate program leader for data science in Livermore's space program.
[04:50]
Luke Peterson
When I order a package to get delivered, the logistics, routing, all of that, that all goes through space. Our financial system depends upon space.
[04:58]
Narrator
What happens when space stops being a backdrop and becomes a pressure point? When the same domain carrying our maps, money, and communications starts changing faster than the people watching it can respond?
[05:11]
Luke Peterson
So this is very, very tough how you deal with it. It's a hard national security problem, but it's one where we would like to maintain freedom of movement, freedom of communications. We would like our military to be able to continue to use space as it sees fit.
[05:24]
Narrator
Philip Rittmuller is a lead engineer at Lawrence Livermore and the principal investigator who helped build a system designed to navigate this problem.
[05:33]
Philip Rittmuller
There's an equivalence to Moore's law that states every 18 months, the processing power of chips will double. Well, there's an equivalent for space where every two years, the number of objects in space is doubling.
[05:48]
Luke Peterson
A secure, stable, and accessible space domain is crucial.
[05:53]
Philip Rittmuller
As challenges to the United States and
[05:56]
Luke Peterson
our allies, Space capabilities continue to increase.
[05:59]
Philip Rittmuller
It's happening really fast. It's a supply and demand thing because the number of space objects doubling every two years means there's a lot more people who need operations centers. But operations centers usually are manned by people, so they can't scale as fast as the rest of the industry.
[06:16]
Narrator
Philip experienced the problem firsthand. It's what his team was faced with when integrating systems operations for the Pandora spacecraft mission.
[06:26]
Philip Rittmuller
As we were developing that, we were trying to find mission operations centers, and the cost of it was so high, we're thinking this is something we can do ourselves for our missions, which are small and experimental. We don't want to have some big fancy operations center. We can just have an operations here on the lab with just the capabilities that we need, and it'll be much less expensive.
[06:47]
Narrator
That idea became StarMock, the satellite telescope,
[06:51]
Philip Rittmuller
aerial drone and remote sensing mission operations center, or starmock for short.
[06:56]
Narrator
Starmak gives Lawrence Livermore the operational backbone for a new generation of agile, lower cost small satellite missions. The place where experimental spacecraft and payload ideas begin moving toward real mission activity. But StarMak wasn't only built to reduce operational costs.
[07:17]
Luke Peterson
One of the big problems we see in space is there's this desire to move quickly and innovate, but you have this risk of actual operations going on. You're actually flying satellites. So Star Amuk allows us to test new technologies, new ways of doing operations and demonstrating those capabilities to folks that they then are more willing to take on and adopt. So it's bridging that valley of death between how you could change space operations to actually getting it out into the field. And so by having that testbed of StarMak, it lets us test out some of those technologies, break them in a safe space. And it is an extension of the laboratory ethos. But into outer space we like to push the boundary on technology and science and how things could be re envisioned. And so StarMak is like our little hub of what the future of space operations could be.
[08:14]
Narrator
A safe, exploratory place to move fast, break things, and learn how to improve in the process. And last summer they did. In July 2025, a satellite company saw something they didn't expect. One of their satellites was being flooded with commands. Hundreds of them in a single day. Far more than any had ever been designed to receive. But the signal wasn't coming from an adversary. The source. Three interns at Lawrence Livermore.
[08:48]
Luke Peterson
We had been kicking around the idea of introducing a new way of automating satellite tasking. Our current satellites, if they want to take a picture of something, they issue the commands, they send it to somebody else and they said, okay, yes, this is the command we're going to issue the satellite. But it's very like long manual process. And so what that means is that the time between, hey, I have an idea, I want to take a picture of something. And when you actually get that picture can be very, very long.
[09:13]
Narrator
Even in perfect conditions, the request itself would take at least 15 minutes. Then between communication procedures and orbital positioning, the whole process from human to satellite to result could take hours.
[09:26]
Luke Peterson
If we look at the space environment, particularly in the national security arena, waiting a few hours is just too long. If there's a threat coming, you want to know it right away.
[09:35]
Narrator
Starmak asked a few students to spend a summer trying to solve the problem.
[09:40]
Luke Peterson
We gave them the task of interfacing with an existing ground based tasking Telescope network and extending that to the space layer. So the Space Force has an existing automation network for their ground based telescopes doing the problem of space domain awareness. And we said, well, could we just extend that to space?
[10:04]
Narrator
But pointing a satellite in orbit is not the same as pointing pointing ground based telescopes. The students had to write the translation between the two systems. And after three months of concentrated effort, the students changed the time of an automatically tasked picture from a satellite of the International space station from 15 minutes down to 10 seconds.
[10:27]
Luke Peterson
It was so fast that we actually ended up breaking the satellite on orbit because in one day, I remember it, they sent over 700 commands to the satellite and the satellite operators weren't prepared for that. We heard when we showed this to people at a big conference in the fall that the owners of the Space Force ground based telescope system said, oh wow, you did that so fast. We have private companies that have been trying to do this for years.
[10:54]
Narrator
Starmock gave them something most space experiments never get a place to try the idea on real systems, find the breaking point and learn from it. With speed a difficult industry obstacle overcome in a single summer. And in today's space age that speed matters.
[11:13]
Luke Peterson
There are adversaries who realize our dominance in space and they want to overtake it. They want to establish their own rules of the road. They want to establish their own norms. They're being increasingly aggressive out there. And so the space mission is becoming harder and harder and harder.
[11:28]
Narrator
Harder orbit is active and sometimes it's intentionally disrupted.
[11:35]
Luke Peterson
The Space Force and other Pentagon agencies will need to respond to the growing
[11:38]
Philip Rittmuller
threat of anti satellite capabilities.
[11:40]
Luke Peterson
A new report says Russia and China
[11:42]
Philip Rittmuller
are making advances in counter space weapons
[11:44]
Luke Peterson
faster than the US is improving its defenses.
[11:53]
Narrator
Looking for a career that challenges and inspires, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a power grid dynamics engineer and a transmission grid engineer, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative mission driven environment. Discover Open positions@llnl.gov careers where big ideas come to life.
[12:48]
Luke Peterson
Our space program really Got started after 2007 Anti Satellite Test by China where they blew up a satellite in orbit and it created a whole bunch of debris.
[12:57]
Narrator
According to US government officials, after three
[13:00]
Luke Peterson
misses, China succeeded in shooting down one
[13:03]
Narrator
of its own aging weather satellites with a medium range ballistic missile fired from the ground.
[13:09]
Luke Peterson
So our things in space are not necessarily immune. Our adversaries could attack it.
[13:13]
Narrator
There are countries who are pursuing very aggressive, very impressive, impressive counter space Capabilities. But an attack on a satellite doesn't have to mean an explosion.
[13:22]
Philip Rittmuller
An adversary might want to interfere with the mission. It could be jamming your spacecraft. Or maybe they want to take a picture of your spacecraft and you don't want them to know what's on your spacecraft. You could teach an agent how to avoid that situation.
[13:34]
Narrator
To make that kind of autonomy possible, software has to be trained and tested far before it's launched into orbit. That's the kind of work Star starmock is trying to make possible.
[13:44]
Philip Rittmuller
As you're developing your satellite and trying to decide if it works. We have the electrostatic discharge or ESD compatible room where we can put in our flight processors and our sensors and make sure everything talks and works together and simulate the environment it will be in using HPC high performance computing. So we can test things out to make sure our hardware works, test the sequence of commands we might want to do, run through that, and then when we're in actual operations, things will go much more smoothly because we tested it all.
[14:17]
Narrator
This is what the team calls hardware in the loop testing. In that room, they can practice the whole mission before launching.
[14:25]
Philip Rittmuller
So you could be running your flight processor with all the software that's going to run on the spacecraft and it decides when to do a burn to change its orbit. You can simulate that whole process. I want to do a turn and then a burn in this direction that goes out to the hpc, which is running a simulation. And the simulation would say, okay, this is how your orbit would change. Oh, this is where you are now. And if you're looking in the direction you told us to look, you're going to see this.
[14:56]
Narrator
Simulate the environment isn't just a metaphor. Starmock sits by behind the lab's firewall, connected to the computing power needed to recreate the world a satellite will face once it's in orbit. Inside that simulated world, engineers can test the satellite's brain. Before the satellite ever leaves the ground, they can give it problems, watch how it responds, and refine the way it makes decisions. One of the tools that makes this possible is called sapi, or Space Situational Awareness in Python, which was developed by ldrd, or Lab Directed Development, we wrote
[15:34]
Luke Peterson
this code that can run efficiently on high performance computing. And what you can do with that is create scenarios where you have satellites flying around the moon, they can fly around Earth, Jupiter, the drag from the solar wind, all this, like physics is in there. And so you get high accuracy modeling. And if you wanted to teach an AI to fly satellites, you can then give the AI that tool and say, okay, you can try to fly a satellite through, through our simulator, play your little video game and figure out if it crashes. And if it crashes, then change it and figure it out.
[16:08]
Narrator
That kind of simulator only matters if people can actually use it. In space research, many of the tools that model orbits and satellite behavior are expensive proprietary systems. SAPI takes a different approach. Lawrence Livermore made it open source, giving students, researchers and small smaller teams access to high fidelity space modeling software without needing a major commercial license.
[16:33]
Luke Peterson
We open sourced it so it's free for the community, which is a big deal in this area because a lot of the other tools are proprietary and tens of thousands of dollars to run their code. That is actually what we did using our high performance computers. You give an AI this simulation tool and you let it play millions and millions of games and it eventually figures out how to fly satellites.
[16:57]
Narrator
Training that AI takes enormous computing power. Running it once trained takes almost none.
[17:05]
Philip Rittmuller
We would like to develop games using AI and HPC that the Guardians can play to learn how to control a spacecraft and to win engagements. And we could use the starmak for that. You could have two teams. One team of Guardians in one room of the Star Mach, another in another room, and they can play against each other and see what techniques work and what doesn't against the simulation that's being run on the hpc.
[17:31]
Narrator
An entire training happening inside a simulated world. A satellite agent learning how to operate in a place it's never been. Then the trained agent moves onto a flight processor small enough to ride a satellite. That's how a spacecraft might act faster. But if satellites can start acting faster on their own, how does anyone keep track of the autonomous sky?
[17:55]
Luke Peterson
Humans can't keep track of this anymore. It used to be that space domain awareness was a human endeavor. There were 10 or 20 things you had to keep track of. Some operators in the US Military could once a day check in, be like, yep, that thing's still there. Great. You can't do that with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of of objects. And so you have to automate. There's this big desire for automation. But all of the systems are legacy, invented in the Cold War. And many of them are still running horribly old computer languages and on very, very old, old systems. Things in space are described by what's called a TLE or two line element. Why is it two lines? Because it's what the punch cards used. The Space Star Mach allows us to be like, okay, we need to move past Punch cards. But like, how? Because we have all this other stuff we have to keep track of. And our operations are getting harder and harder and harder. There is no space to innovate in this area. If you have a starmak, what you can do is you can prototype these things and be like, hey, actually, here's a way you could automate satellite tasking. We worked it all out. Here's a data schema. It's not based on punch cards anymore.
[19:02]
Narrator
The sky now produces more information than any analyst can hold it with. Once space force alerts, satellite maneuvers, close approaches, breakups. Each one a clue, but rarely the whole story. But there are threads between these pieces. And a Lawrence Livermore student prototype named Supernova was built to connect the dots.
[19:24]
Luke Peterson
Imagine you have a chatbot in front of you, and you can ask it questions about satellites. Hey, has Satellite A, this U.S. satellite, does it have any relation to Satellite B, this Japanese satellite?
[19:38]
Narrator
Ask the question and something assembles on screen in real time in front of you.
[19:43]
Luke Peterson
On the chatbot on your screen is created in real time what looks like a spider web. Or maybe it looks like that guy from the meme of, like, all of the red threads connected behind him. I've stumbled onto a major company conspiracy Mac. How about that for stress on your screen in real time that a conspiracy theory board gets created connecting the US Satellite to the Japanese satellite. And the chatbot comes back and says, yes, actually there is a relation between these two. And there's this other satellite that has made close approaches to each of these independently, months apart. There's this other satellite from China that has actually gone near both of these calculating approach vector. That's the kind of information that an analyst would really like to know. It would take them months and a fair amount of luck to find the connection between US Satellite A and Japanese Satellite B.
[20:37]
Narrator
One alert may only matter because of something that happened months earlier. The future of space operations depends on seeing those connections while there is still time to act. StarMock's new technology is as much about understanding relationships as it is tracking objects. The future of space exploration isn't being built around one tool, one student project, or one mission. It's an entire infrastructure, a place where new ways of operating can be tested before anyone knows exactly what they will become.
[21:11]
Philip Rittmuller
I think of it like this. When DARPA developed the Internet, they didn't know that it was going to enable Google and smartphones and Amazon. They developed this infrastructure, put it out there and, and let super smart people figure out what to do with it. That's what the StarMaker is. We've developed infrastructure and I'm really excited to see where it goes.
[21:30]
Narrator
And it's already reaching beyond the lab. The Space Force is standing up an AI accelerator centered at Stanford, and Livermore is signing on as its mission transition partner. The place where a promising idea from academia gets pushed from ideation into reality.
[21:49]
Philip Rittmuller
I want to put it out there and let this team of super smart people we have here at Lawrence Livermore go tackle new problems and figure out what they want to do with it. Because I am sure that I'm going to be surprised with some ideas that
[22:01]
Narrator
come out of this above our heads. The traffic keeps merging on faster satellites, smarter adversaries, a sky doubling in objects every two years. Whoever learns to fly it, to teach the machines to read the whole crowded lane at once to move in seconds instead of hours will help set the bar for a safer, more secure sky. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating, rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the Follow or Subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real world challenges in science, engineering, business or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab. Right now, positions are open for a senior guidance, navigation and Controls Engineer and a Senior Business Operations Specialist. These are just a few of the more than 100 exciting roles available at Lawrence Livermore. You'll work on projects that matter, from national security to cutting edge scientific advancements. Join a team that values innovation, collaboration and professional growth. Explore opportunities@llnl.gov careers where your next career move could make history.