Araz Faizi (9:54)

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Maria Varmazas (10:49)

Co Founder and CTO at Khan Space we'll be featuring my full conversation with Araz and Tim Sills from AWS on the AWS in Orbit episode, which will be released this Saturday. So this is Araz telling me about how he founded Khan.

Tim Sills (11:07)

I went to high school with my co founder cmac. We went to college together. We were roommates, we studied engineering but our passions were different. My passion was automation and computers and his was space. So swift paths after that we both did graduate school and went and worked and semi worked on NASA, JPL missions, commercial missions and we've been very close friends. So he kept telling me that look, there's an opportunity. I see a massive opportunity in the space industry where we're going from old space to new space. Old space where you, you know, a handful of nation states or major companies would spend billions of dollars designing a mission, building it, launching it and operating it to a place where the cost of going to space is going to be a fraction of what it used to be. So now we're going to have huge bursts of growth in commercial space industry. Turns out he was right. So in 2019 we started experimenting with a couple of problems that we predicted that was going to be painful problems for space industry. In 2020 we realized that we are on the right right path and we together we started a company and the first thing that we we identified as an acute problem that needed to be solved was collision avoidance in space. So we started working on an autonomous satellite collision avoidance solution where our product would notify you if we detected a high risk conjunction of potential collision events in orbit and if you needed to perform a maneuver, we would give you a maneuver option or optimal maneuver options to get out of the way. But as the industry has progressed that problem has scaled up quite a bit. So fast forward to today Can Space is a space situation awareness company. We focus on analytics, we don't have our own sensors by design, we ingest data from government and commercial data sources from satellite operators. And you can think of Khan as ways for space or Google Maps for space. We are the premier space traffic coordination platform for satellite operators. Over 20 satellite operators use our solution Pathfinder today to coordinate with each other when they have high risk conjunctions on where they want to fly around each other. We recently launched another product called satcat.com. you know, it's been a very popular solution that's an open source platform where we ingest data from several open source data sources in one place where operators and enthusiasts and users, I would say because we have a broad spectrum of users who can come to sadcat and find what they're looking for when it comes to space data.

Maria Varmazas (13:46)

So how did satcat come to be?

Tim Sills (13:48)

Our internal team was frustrated by the fact that you had to go to like 4, 5, 6, 10 different websites and web pages and data sources to compile the data that you needed. So for example, I want to see who the satellite belongs to. Sometimes I had to go to three different sources to figure that out. I wanted to see what the historical data was for this and I had to go and download data from multiple sources to use them. One person on the team in fact decided that he was going to solve the problem for us. So he started building on this thing and it started to look really nice, I feel really nice. So at some point we decided that look, let's just open it up to the public and see what we will get. And we just did a couple of, I think all we did was one interview and then one or two LinkedIn posts and within a few weeks we were serving thousands of customers. And that was kind of one of those moments where we said, huh, there's something there. And yeah, it's been just massive growth since then.

Maria Varmazas (14:56)

Awesome. So yeah, tell me a bit about who uses SatCat and a little bit about what they use SatCat for.

Tim Sills (15:03)

SatCat is serving a really wide range of different audiences. You can be just a space enthusiast to go and see where the ISS is or when's the next time ISS going to pass over my head or oh, I heard about this orbital debris thing. Let me go see what, you know, how it looks or what is it. All the way to someone who is a seasoned satellite operator and they want to go and look at their competitors constellation and see what kind of maneuvers they have been performing just as a comp intel kind of. Right. So you have everything in there. You have reporters who go in and get the data they need you have government folks, we've had several government agencies come to us and say, hey, this looks great. Can you get this and that? So, and that, that's not something that we expected. But you can come to sadcat with, with a different goal in mind and you'll have a completely different experience from another type of Persona who comes in and looks for that. And that's what we're trying to kind of fine tune to deliver better experience to different Personas more properly.

Maria Varmazas (16:07)

Fantastic. Going from that aha moment to scale, that had to have been quite a challenge, especially so quickly. Can you walk me through how that went?

Tim Sills (16:17)

Well, one thing I can tell you is that, you know, generally the engineering side of things and scalability and security, none of that is an issue because when you build your infrastructure, when you build your system in an infrastructure that's scalable and all that, so that's something that you don't have to worry about. So most of our efforts have gone into trying to figure out what would be the next thing on set from a, from a product perspective, from the capabilities perspective. In reality, it's kind of changed the face of our company. It was very day and night kind of difference for me. You know, when I used to go to events and meet folks and talk to people, they would recognize the company, what we do. But it would be rare if they were able to name all the products that we had. Right. But now if I have the same kind of interaction with folks, one of the first things that they mention is sat. They're like, oh, I did this thing as that was cool. Or oh, how's sadget coming? Or oh, what's the next thing on sadcat? So kind of sadcat has become the new brand for the company per se. So we've made quite a bit of shift in the direction of the company based on that experience and that learning. So obviously we've put more efforts, engineering efforts, more product efforts into satgat and hopefully it'll pay out.

Maria Varmazas (17:49)

We'll be right back. Welcome back. We've been talking a lot about amateur radio here at N2K lately. My colleague Dave Bittner just got his technician license, so he's officially a HAM now. And I took a class a few years ago but didn't get around to taking the exam. So I'm thinking it's about time I just get it done. One thing that stands to reason about radio, whether you're ham or not, is the greater the distance you want to cover the range, the more power you need and the bigger antenna you need. Yes, there are other variables to keep in mind too, but please don't me hams. I'm trying to keep this simple. So if you want to talk to a neighbor a few blocks away, a handheld radio can do the trick. But stuff way out in space, well, think of how big Arecibo is was. So when you hear the headline that amateur radio operators were able to get signals from Voyager 1 nearly 25 billion kilometers away, no, they were not doing it from a mobile rig in a car, although that would be extremely impressive. No, they were using the Dwingaloo Dish telescope in the Netherlands. Big dish telescopes around the world make up NASA's Deep Space Network, and they usually communicate with Voyager 1. But Dwingelo is 25 meters across and that is much smaller than those 70 meter dishes in the Deep Space Network. So catching the extremely faint signal from something so extremely far away on something that's way smaller than is meant to pick up those signals, that's a challenge for sure. But Cameras, the organization of volunteers who operate the Dwingaloo radio telescope, were able to receive Voyager 1's signals on December 8, and that is a rare achievement for any telescope on Earth, let alone for the world's oldest rotatable 25 meter radio telescope and of course, for the people operating it. So congratulations to Cameras and well done, Dwingaloo. And oh yeah, I will be interviewing Dave Buettner about him becoming an official ham. So definitely stay tuned to hear more on that in an upcoming show. That's it for T minus for December 12, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operations operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Our executive editor is Brandon Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazas. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. T minus.