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Founder's Story
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
00:29:17
Daniel Robbins speaks with Minh Nguyen and John Avera of xOrbita about the fast growing space economy and the orbital debris problem threatening it. Minh shares how a high school research journey turned into a company after learning debris can destroy years of satellite work in seconds. John explains how his defense and engineering background helped shape xOrbita’s intelligence first approach to safer collision avoidance in orbit.
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Interviewer
Comcast business helps retailers become seamlessly restocking, frictionless paying favorite shopping destinations.
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John
It's how nationwide restaurants become touchscreen ordering quick serving eateries and how hospitals become the patient scanning data, managing healthcare facilities that we all depend on.
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Interviewer
With leading networking and connectivity, advanced cybersecurity
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John
and expert partnership, Comcast business is powering the engine of modern business Powering restrictions
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Commercial Voiceover
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Min
That would be crazy, Tammy. But you got surprisingly affordable renters insurance through Geico, so it could be covered. Giving you peace of mind.
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Commercial Voiceover
A I love a story that ends well.
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Min
Next up, love stories. Are they all they're cracked up to be?
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Commercial Voiceover
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Interviewer
So Min 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, 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?
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Min
All right, so I'll take the start of that. And it's important because the reason why we exist or the reason why we're 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. 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, that everyone just accepts normally. But in that there's an over congestion of satellite particles, debris and objects being centered in space. So when you think about why are people all talking about space right now is 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.
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John
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. There are over 30,000 tracked objects in orbit and hundreds of thousands of debris, smaller debris from 10cm which is about the size of a grapefruit to 1cm which is about the size of a blueberry. That ground based sensors can't see it. And so any one of those can destroy an satellite worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So we're building a trillion dollar industry on the infrastructure that we can't fully protect yet.
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Interviewer
I mean this is, 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, 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, but so you, 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, how did you then go to. Let's look at debris.
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Min
All right, so. So I'll take this one. I actually starting Xorbita was a lot of a solo, like, 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, you know, this b, this vast ocean, the way that you describe it for the ocean of the amount of ideas and opportunities you could take in space. Like 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, the reason why it gotten defunct is because this piece of debris particle had hit the satellite and basically made the practical application for it unusable. Because even if the debris was, was just maybe a centimeter in diameter and it didn't cause like 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 people's time out of 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. But looking at the companies that were doing it and trying to 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. 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 up ramp 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 Forward has started.
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Interviewer
Wow. I mean, I don't know what I was doing in high school, but I definitely was not solving space problems. I love that. I mean, because I, you know, 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 are X, Y, Z. But the fact that you wanted to solve this major problem and then John, how did you come on board?
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John
Well, I'll tell you, I was just cruising around looking at, you know, quantum computing was kind of a new thing. So I was doing a search on quantum and I saw an article that men 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 and take a look at that. And I started reading through it and it was well written, it was a lit article and 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. I know a little bit about that. I worked in the Air Combat 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, doing detections from the edge. We was doing this back in 2019. And so I said, you know, I think I can help here because the very bottom of that, of his page said, do you want to help build this with us, something 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 and he got excited because I was like, here's how we're going to do. He's like, john, how would you do it? And I said, well, let me explain to. 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.
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Interviewer
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?
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Min
So we're going to hit it like two pronged. I'll talk the. The industry facing ones and then he'll talk about, you know, 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. The whole system of tracking, analyzing debris and making satellites move out of the way of. 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. 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. But it isn't spatially between the 10 centimeter debris particles and the 1 centimeter debris particles, their actual density is like 50, 50. So adding more data wouldn't exactly solve the issue. And you 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 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. 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 was the propulsion issue actually, because whenever they use a collision avoidance system, you want, you see a piece of space debris coming at you and you have to move out 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. 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.
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John
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Min
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Min
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John
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Min
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Min
terms not going to live as long. And we've calculated that based, 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. 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.
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John
I can tell you we're building, what we're doing 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 at, we're talking about putting sensors into orbit, but on small affordable cubesats. Right. And we paired them with AI that doesn't just process data, it learns from it and it's going to continue to learn from it. Right. These observations HD system smarter. And that's fundamentally different from legacy SSA which 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 1,000. You know, our system is compound the more data ingest from detections, the better it gets of finding the things that nobody can see. And turn those detections to real time collision avoidance recommendations that satellites 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 saying that what I found, but give them recommendations, give them, you know, a maneuver recommendation if they need to make it. You know, that's how our approach is different. Beyond just the AI is information density. A lot of companies in space, they're taking a brute force approach. They're going to do massive sensor fleets for coverage, but we're achieving comparable global coverage. We're roughly a sixth of the size of the fleet through our licensed sensor technology and learning architectures. We have an architecture that's designed to be flexible in learning.
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Interviewer
Right.
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John
And this isn't just concept. We got a working system running in the end flight represent on flight representation edge hardware in the same processes that could fly in space. It processes sensory imaging, it could detect the objects, propagate the orbits. This is important. Calculate the collision probabilities and then recommend maneuvers. And that's our mvp. And that's what we essentially got running today.
- [18:22]
Interviewer
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 hundreds of million dollars on a satellite that 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, 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? Or what, what can you use the data for? Or are you thinking about this now?
- [19:10]
Min
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 Transast shifted their model from like asteroid mining to like 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 the system into multiple hoops, constantly being there for every single step of solving the debris issue. So right now we're monitoring debris and collision avoidance. We can get good at collision avoidance. But I am in no way saying that once we get good collision avoidance, that that's going to be the end of it. 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. And that can maybe even convert to a lot of actual lives being lost in the process. And I'll explain that a little bit here because there's like a realization here that we don't just use satellites for our own little, like, 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. It's we have satellites in space, but we have satellites in space that are specifically targeted to doing things like sensing fires, sensing like 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 sun up satellite to capture the debris. 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.
- [21:49]
John
You know, I can see even in the longer term exorbitant becoming infrastructure the entire industry even relies on. When you think about operators, launch providers, insurers, regulators, you know, as space commercializes further and more nations or businesses, global businesses become space far. 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 run runs through space today. Gps. You know, if the US GPS system went down, did a little math on it, it's estimated, it suggests it will cost about a billion dollars a day. You know, weather forecasters, disaster response. I come from disaster recovery. I've spent many years in IT in the National Guard, broadband for rural and underserved communities and crop monitoring. And I spent time in financial, in the fintech world. Financial transaction timing as well as supply chains and 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.
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Interviewer
I'm fascinated. We had another guest on who was talking about using space matter to solve hacking of quantum computing. And they were explaining to me about space matter 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 irregardless of X orbiter. 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 X orbit, just in general. Like if you think A hundred years, 200 years, could we be like Star Trek just floating around space full time?
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Min
So I like this question because when you think about Xorbita and when you talk about Xorbita, like when you pitch 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 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, I'm not a pessimist. I don't look at space and I see the issue and like that's all I focus on. Like 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, 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. But I hope at least in my lifetime that we can see a large majority of satellites going out to deep space and taking advantage of all the different minute details that are out there that are completely irreplicable in at least even here in our solar system. Like my favorite mission of all time has to be the Europa Clipper. I wanted to work, I was like this naive high school student wanting to work on like the Europa Clipper. I was, I was messaging random like NASA people at Godar and NJPL like hey, can I work on this? And they're like well obviously no. But it's the fact that we can go out and analyze like moons on Jupiter for signs of life or the potential to house life being a multi planetary species, like that's what gets me excited because it's like we can do so much more as a species and as like a civilization. And being able to take advantage of that in the next coming few years is my optimism towards space.
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John
And see that's the good adventure side, right? I mean that's, that's the pioneering side of it. I have also and I'm that kind of way too. But I also look at the, the industry. Well first of all, let's talk about the science. The more we understand our environment, which space is our environment, more we understand that, the better. I think we can make informed decisions about what makes this good for us here on Earth. But also look at, there's untapped resources now we're talking way in the future. But everybody that's out there has resources, right from oxygen to minerals. Think about, I mean think about rare earth minerals is a very valuable thing like magnets, you know, rare earth minerals that come out of very small places in United States. So we have to sometimes factory do things or run electrical circuits through a metal to actually get a magnet versus a natural magnet. Think about what's out there. What rare minerals are out there that are very useful, that could be bacteria. That's like mining, right? Mining on the moon, mining on Mars. And that's just scratching the surface. So I see it as an industrial resource that's out there that is untapped. We got to get good at it. We got to make space safe for travel, safe. And as men said, we got to start with what's within our reach. Within our reach is the Milwaukee orbit and we could talk about the middle Earth orbit and then we talk about geo. But right now we gotta, you gotta take it one step at a time. And once you learn from that step, then you advance it to the next step, then you learn and then you take you the next step. That's the way I see it.
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Interviewer
If you had the chance, it might be a one way ticket though to go and set up on another planet. But you could be moving species to another planet, would you do it?
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Min
I would do it. Like, like I told you before, like at heart I'm solving like a, like all I talk about is an issue and all I'm solving is an issue. But if I had the opportunity to build forward and do something of that scale or that like magnitude that I would take it in a heartbeat, like I can't. It's not like there's like this dissatisfaction like here on Earth. I'll have known for my entire life really is that we can do more. I feel like that's what we've been building to all of these years and all these decades at least leading to my generation, is that we're capable of doing a lot more. So like that, that's, that's, that's all that I. That's, that's, that's not all that I know but is it is like the biggest avenue are the most probable avenue that I would take forward to just build and do more.
- [29:09]
John
I have a pioneering spirit about if I was given the opportunity. Absolutely highly unlikely but I would absolutely do it. I mean I've been on been around the world and back again several times and sometimes in bad places, sometimes in good places. So I would do it. But right now I think as being a realist though which makes me give it even more attention to it is that if I'll send someone young like men there I want to make sure it's safe and I want to do everything I can to make something as safe, accurate and efficient. And so yeah, I mean I would
- [29:47]
Interviewer
do it but yeah, that's why we need Xorbiter, you know like so men can go travel to other and we can all travel to other planets and set up life. Very interesting. Thank you so much. I mean this has been great. I don't get to talk to too many people about space but I would say probably 250 people. I have asked this question though about if they would go on a one way ticket and I have to say maybe only five people have said they would but but so we need people that will because obviously at one day hopefully we'll have some robot companions at that time which it seems that'll be possible in the next year if people want to get in touch with you both obviously sounds like you're investors if people are interested to partner I'm sure there's companies that need your services. How can they do so?
- [30:36]
Min
All right, well you guys can always check us out on our website which is just www.xorita.com. you can always check out both me and John's LinkedIn. You know we're flying out to different places. I'm going down to Space Foundation's economic forum next week. He's going to. We're both going to Stanford down March to to pitch at their VC boot camp. We're going a bunch of places, people know where we're going. If you want to see us there, meet us there. If you want to talk to us directly over the phone we have our contact information on the Xor website with the exact message that led John to work on this in the first place. Do you want us help us build this? If you want to help us build this then do it. Reach out to us, put your contact information there and we can set up a call.
- [31:21]
Interviewer
Awesome. Well thank you Min and John. I can't wait in a year from now come back. I want to know what's happening in space in six months to a year because technology moves so fast. Everything is just so fast right now. But I super appreciate both your time and the fact that you are dedicating to something that could possibly solve and make humanity better. I don't get to talk to people doing that every day. So thank you for what you do.
- [31:45]
Min
Thank you.
- [31:45]
John
Appreciate it.
- [31:46]
Min
Thank you.