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

I went on to your LinkedIn page and I have to say, I understood 5% of it. But the 5% that I understood, my mind was blown, and the 95% that I did not understand, I wouldn't understand. And I mean, like, space debris, how, I have so many questions about how does one even get into the business of space debris?

But before we go into that, everyone I know is talking about space. Like space is the new business frontier, which I find very fascinating.

“Can either of you are both talk about why in 2026 is everybody now looking at space?”

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 are solving this issue is a part of the reason why everyone is talking about space right now. Because right now, space is at a point where it's easy to get into it. You know, we've had the foundational layers being built upon us year by year, decade by decade,

with companies like SpaceX, launching the rockets every single day. And there's satellite 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 everyone just accepts normally. But in that there is 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

is 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.

Like an avidad, 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 is 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 and orbit.

“Here's the thing that nobody's talking about.”

All that value is sitting in the environment. Yes, getting more dangerous every day. A risky. I got to use the term risky morning thing. They're over 30,000 tracked objects in orbit and hundreds of thousands of debris, small

of debris from 10 centimeters, which is about the size of a grapefruit to 1 centimeter, which is about the size of a blueberry, that gram-based sensors can't see it. So anyone 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.

I mean, this is incredible.

Like, you're talking 600 billion now, I didn't even know, to now over maybe 3x to 1.8 trillion. And I imagine if we're putting, if it's possible, to put data centers in space, which I would imagine a data center is very large if that's possible to do. And there's a lot of debris that's having, how, okay, 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 this one. Yes.

“I think the space is almost like our new blue ocean, right?”

Not a lot of players, but a lot of opportunity. So when you both look at this, it's like, okay, there's a big opportunity in space, the final frontier. How did you then go to, let's look at debris? All right.

So I'll take this one. I actually, starting X orbit 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 mean, I'm in high school. I want to end off. My high school year was some cool research, you know, getting into a good university. But I dug into a deeper, right, because I was shifting through so many different ideas within, you know, 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 Ashford mining, and then one in deep space. Those are two completely unrelated things, but I wanted to do them because space is awesome.

like, a very big wall or a very big fear section, because I came across this one article

“of a Chinese university group that I was launching their own satellite.”

And just a year after they launched this satellite that they had spent their entire university time on, it had gotten defunct. And the reason why I got in defunct is because it's piece of debris particle had hit the satellite

and basically made the practical application for it unusable, because even if the debris

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, and all of everyone's time was useless. So when I thought about it, I was like, in years time, that could be me. That could be my mission.

That could be my friend's mission, that could be like my family's mission, if anyone else wants to get into space. So I thought, I want to try and solve this issue, 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, you've heard about Dune's Day scenarios like the Custer 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 extra”

we're to start. 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 think there's always a misconception about generations, like

every generation says generations ago were lazy, right? It always is like, 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 to do? Well, I'll tell you, I was just cruising around looking at quantum computing, which kind of a new thing.

I saw I was doing a search on quantum, and I saw an article that meant it written about a spectrometer, a quantum dot spectrometer, but on the title, I just saw a quantum, and I saw space, as I said, what this looks cool, and I'll take a look at that, and I started reading through it. It was well written.

It was a lit article, and on the spectrometer, and I started to say, "Wait, man, this is sensors. This is short wave 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 AirCarMet Command Federal Laboratory, who used to be known as the YouTube Federal Laboratory, where we were doing just this, and I was part of that team that put AI on

the Web Assistant for the first time, and we were doing detections from the edge, we were

doing this back in the 2019. And so I said, "You know, I think I can help here," because the very bottom of that page said, "Do you want to help build this with us? Such a good attitude." And I was like, "Yes, I do.

Yes, I do, because I think I know how to help. I think I can help them with this." And so we started talking, and he got excited, because I was like, "Here's how we don't have John. How would you do it?"

And I said, "Well, let me explain to him," and I started getting technical details that I make most people go to sleep, but I was like, "That I think we can do this." I think we can build enough of this, to get attention.

“And so that's how I got involved, and then the historic transition from there.”

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 is 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? So we're going to hit it like two pronged. I'll talk the industry facing ones, and then we'll talk about the technical details that

we've had. So the SSA industry is what we like to define ourselves in, space situational awareness. That's the whole system of tracking, analyzing the brain, making satellites move out of the way of it. It has a really bad look on.

There's a really bad look on the SSA industry because it's extremely inefficient. I talked to you before about how I personally thought that those companies currently working on the issue were not doing a good enough job.

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, like there's 120 million estimated to be particles

in space. And we've tracked 40,000 of them. It sounds like a big number, but that's 0.04%. And people think that's the big issue, but it isn't spatially between the 10 centimeter brief particles and the one centimeter brief 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 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 Starling for an example, right? We like to bring in Starling to the conversation because when I say majority of satellite

operators use SSA tools, it's just Starling. 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 Starling 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 7 to 8 years. But why are they capping their lifetime at 5 years? So it's a really odd question of mine, so if it's not the hardware, if it's not the

actual satellite bust, and what is it? It was the propulsion issue, actually, because whenever they use a collision avoidance system,

“you see this piece of space becoming 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. The amount of that that you can use throughout your lifetime is what we call Delta V. And as you use that Delta V, inherently, your satellite is not going to live as long. And we've calculated that based of 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 life time 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."

And I can tell you, we're building, 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, they're didn't see here. We're looking, we're talking about putting sensors into orbit, but on small affordable keep-sats, right?

And we paired them with AI that just processed data, it learns from it and it's going to continue to learn from it, right? East observation, HTCIS, or smaller, and that's done only different from legacy SSA, which is essentially static right now. You've got the radar, you've cornered it to the sky, and it gives you saying, "Keep

a Billy, I'm day one, that it does from day one and a thousand." You know, our system was compounded, the more data ingest from the detections, the better it gets, the finding the things that nobody can see. And turn those detections to real time, collision of what it's recommendations, that satellites operators can act on immediately.

So I'm seeing you real time, I processed it there, I'm not sitting in 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 no who needs to know, and not just say I know what I found, but give them recommendations, get 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, it's information density.

sensor fleets for coverage, but we're achieving comparable global coverage, we're roughly a six in the size of fleet to our license sensor technology and learning at architectures. We have an architecture that's designed to be fledged more in learning, right? And this is in 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 processed the sensor imaging, it could detect the objects propagate the orbits, this is important, calculate the collision probabilities,

“and then recommend maneuvers, and that's our MPP, and that's what we essentially got”

running today. Amazing. So, what do you see the benefit is, obviously besides the biggest benefit here, which I understand is the less maneuvers or better maneuvers, more information, the less fuel they use, the longer they can stay in space, obviously you're spending billions of dollars on a hundred

and a million dollars on a satellite, the longer you can have it operate, you know, you

could, you know, cut in half the cost of then having to send another one up and I'm sure every time you send a satellite, there's possibly a satellite, it 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 can you use the data for, or are

you thinking about this now? Right. Yeah.

“So, the obvious next steps are two different things.”

First, it's active debris removal, and second, it's active debris recycling. Westering is a very small step in the full scale of actually solving the issue.

Now we always think like we're solving the tracking issue, now there's a bunch of companies

popping up, like trans-asher 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 a collision avoidance, but I am no, I am in no way saying that once we get good collision avoidance, that that's going to be the end of it, 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.

“I 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 you do, 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 or four months of lifetime shave off of them, that could be the difference of something major happening within orbit,

or even happening down here on Earth. So the first step is monitoring, having better collision avoidance. The second step from there is once we have reliable enough data, then we can start sending up satellites or thinking about having those companies that are being built right now, send up 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 and economic loss

leader, because we're always losing economic value and losing money for the sake of science,

right? You know, I could say even in a longer term, it's sort of a common infrastructure of the entire industry, even if it allows on, if you think about operators, launch providers, launchers, regulators, you know, space commercializes further and more nations or, or businesses, global businesses become space-farory.

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's roughly run, run through space today, GPS, you have the US GPS system went down, little a map in it.

It's estimate is suggest you will cost about a billion dollars a day, you know, whether

in it, in the National Guard, broadband for rural and under survey communities and crop monitoring. And I spent time in financial, in a young fintech world, financial transaction timing, as well, supply change logistics. So space isn't inspirational anymore, right?

It's a critical infrastructure, and it's only becoming even more central.

“So that's why this safety, I see this is a big safety data.”

Big future. I'm fascinated. We had another guest on who is talking about using space matter to solve hacking of quantum computing, and they were explained to me about space matter and and such, and I thought entropy, and I thought it was very, I mean, I'm really fascinated with the future of space.

I'm curious the two of you, you know, in regards to X orbital, like not a business question, more a personal question. How do you, like, what do you think the future is when we look at space, space travel, right, interplanetary, maybe setting, 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 orbital, just in general. If you think a hundred years, two hundred years, could we be like Star Trek, just floating around space full time? So I like this question, because when you think about X orbital, and when you talk about X orbital, like when you pitch the actual idea, and you talk about it for months and months

of time over, like, talking to investors, talking to satellite operators, it's a lot of, like, fear, it's a lot of, like, looking at the problem of things, and saying, like, hey, we need to solve this, and it's, it's very uncomfortable that we have to get down to that truth, because, you know, we do have to solve the issue. But I like these questions, because really, from the start of this, I, 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, astrid money. I mentioned before, that's what I wanted to work on before this, but I understood there is 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, 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 menu details that are out there that are completely irreplicatable, 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, at GoDAR and at, in JPL, 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-clanatory species, like, that's what gets me excited because”

it's like, we can do so much more as the 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. I say 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 also look at the, the industry.

Um, well, first of all, it's on the side, so more we understand our environment, which space

is our environment, more we understand that better, I think we can make informed decisions about what makes this good for us here on Earth. But also look at there's a, untapped resources. Now, we're talking way in the future, but every body that's out there has resources, right? Um, oxygen to minerals, think about, I mean, think about rare earth minerals is a, a very

valuable thing, like magnets, you know, rare earth minerals that come out of very small places in, you know, in space. So we have to sometimes factory do things or run electrical circuits through a, a middle to actually get a magnet versus a natural magnet. Think about what's out there, what, what rare minerals are out there that are very useful

that could be better here. That's the, that's like mining, right? Something on the moon, mining on Mars, um, and that's just scratching the surface. So I see it as an industrial, um, resource that's out there that is untapped. We got to get good at it.

We got to make space to save a travel safe and as men said, we got to start with, within

And we could talk about the middle, middle or the orbit, never talk about geo.

But right now, we've got to, you've got to take a word step at a time and what you learn is from that step, then you, and faster to the next step than you learn.

“And then you need to take you to the next step.”

That's the way I said. 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? I would do it.

Um, like, like I told you before, like at heart, I'm, I'm solving like a, like, I'm all about to talk about as an issue, and all I'm solving is an issue, um, but if I, the opportunity

to build forward and do something of that scale or that, like, magnitude that I would take

it in our, um, like, I can't, it's not like there's, like, this dissatisfaction, like here on earth, like, I'll have no, I'll have known for my entire life really is that we can do more. Um, I feel like that's what we've been building to all of these region 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, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's not all that I know, but it is, um, it is like the biggest avenue, or the, the most probable avenue that I would take forward to just build into more. I have a pioneer spirit about, well, if I was giving up, depending on absolutely, um, probably, I'm likely, but I would absolutely view it.

I'm, I've, I've been on, I've been around the world and back again, several times, sometimes in bad places, sometimes in good places, uh, so I would do it, but, uh, right now, I think, as I've been a realist though, which makes me even even more attention to his data. If I was sin, someone young, like, men there, I want to make sure it's safe.

And I want to do everything I can to make something, it's safe, accurate, and efficient.

“And so, yeah, I mean, I would do it, but yeah, that's why we need X-Overday, you know, like,”

so men can go travel to other, and we can all travel to other planets and set up life, uh, 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, uh, 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 your, you know, investors,

if people are interested, the partner, I'm sure there's companies that need your services, how can they do so?

All right. Well, you guys can always check us out on our website, which is just www.xorida.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 on stations, economic forum next week. He's going to stay. We're both going to stand for down in March to, to pitch at their PC boot camp.

We're going a bunch of places, people know what 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 XO River website with the exact message that led John to work on this in the first place. Do you want to help us build this? If you want to help us build this, then do a reach out to us, put your contact information there. And we can set up a call.

Awesome. Well, thank you, men and John. I can't wait any year from now. Come back. I want to know what's happening in space in six months to year.

Because the 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.

Thank you. Appreciate it.