Two commercial space companies have agreed to work together to strengthen national security capabilities in commercial space. Voyager Space and Palantir are leveraging their capabilities to help support and protect new technologies used on the International Space Station and the upcoming Starlab commercial space station. I wanted to know more about what this deal means and who's involved, so I spoke with Matt Kuta, co-founder, president, and chief operating officer of Voyager Space.
matt kuta Voyager Space and Palantir are both Denver-based companies. And Voyager, we are a space technology company and the world's largest commercial user of the International Space Station. In particular, we are also the prime contractor for the construction of a privately owned replacement facility for the International Space Station through a public-private partnership. When you think about space stations and platforms, space generates large amounts of data, both structured and unstructured. For lack of a better analogy, the ability to send all data to a pipe is kind of stuck because it's restricted to the pipe. It would be very difficult to send all the data back to Earth for transmission. So when we think about how to leverage all this data generated on private space stations, we're looking at edge computing concepts or leveraging companies like Palantir. The reliability and ability of artificial intelligence and machine learning has proven to essentially communicate to the customer, the end user, an answer or several answer choices that can be used according to the customer's needs. So we arrive at this really unique partnership between Palantir and Voyager Space, but Palantir isn't in the business of building space stations. Voyager is. At the same time, Voyager is not involved in creating organic AI machine learning capabilities from scratch. That's how it happened.
Eric White So when we talk about AI and machine learning capabilities, what we primarily mean is creating mechanisms that can capture all of the vast amounts of data that is being collected all the time by any machine in the universe today. Like you said, it's a lot of data, so it's just a matter of what to do with it, break it down, categorize it in a way that's actually useful.
matt kuta right? Well, it's a little bit of both. In fact, it turns out that's part of what customers need. right. So some of our customers are saying, “Here are our constraints, these are the outcomes that we want,” and maybe doing something for tracking at sea or something like that, or for warfighters on the battlefield. Some people may send me answers as if they were trying to send me a message. . This is a very precise solution that we provide to our customers. But it could also relate to your other points, hey, we have all the data. Here, we will introduce a more carefully selected combination of options and a smorgasbord of options that you can try out. But the bottom line is, how can we leverage the space station's high-powered computing at the edge, partnering with companies like Palantir, to do much more for huge packets of data that we might not be able to send to everything? How can you submit answers that are concise and user-friendly? Completed and ready to be sent to Earth.
Eric White Now let's return the focus to the customer mentioned above. Who would that be? I imagine it's a government agency, and perhaps other organizations whose data might be useful. Who do you want to work with? And what will the results of their efforts be?
matt kuta Yeah. Now, as we talked about today, Voyager is the largest commercial user of the International Space Station. In fact, Voyager and Palantir are already working on a joint offer to a Department of Defense customer. So they are thinking about replacing that ISS. It is a continuation of what we are already doing today and the scope of what will happen in the future. You can see it when you think about these customers, definitely national security customers. However, considering that the future space station called STAR Lab will be a commercial station, it is certain that it can serve both national security and commercial uses. So an example would be Star Lab, which we serve, which is a Department of Defense customer that helps support naval assets, perhaps the U.S. Navy. But we think through commercial applications. Perhaps there may be a tangential or direct application of supporting commercial enterprises with our transport vessels. something like that.
Eric White Understood. I'm talking with Matt Kuta. He is the president of Voyager Space. So when you're talking about these national security implications, it's important to cover this, to defeat this, to actually look at the amount of business that these commercial space companies are actually doing with defense agencies around the world. From people who are, you know, the amount of opportunities to work together has exploded. And, you know, part of that importance is that the defense industry and defense agencies recognize the importance of space. But can you talk a little bit about that and how much you're working with government agencies for national security purposes?
matt kuta Yeah. Well, this is a bad use of the word when talking about space people and the explosion of the industry. oh. Yeah.
Eric White sorry. Space Hour is full of puns.
matt kuta oh yeah. But considering how quickly it's growing, it might be. Well, it's a really exciting time to be in space, in the sector. Commercial space department. You know, there are a few things. One, let's call it the national security apparatus, is in this period of transition. And you know that's not going to happen completely, for a lot of reasons. However, during this transition period, the U.S. government recognizes how efficient the private sector is and instead of holding some of these hard assets in government-owned and government-operated ownership for decades, We're trying to leverage that efficiency on both sides. , its agility in innovation, speed of execution and completion, and ability to purchase it as a service. You know, we talked about the space station. As you know, today the International Space Station is owned by the government. It's actually five space agencies, five different government agencies. NASA, the European Space Agency, Roscosmos, JASA, the Japanese Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It is effectively owned and capitalized by these five entities. And when the International Space Station deorbits in the announced year 2030, the U.S. government will never again own a low-orbit space station. It will be owned by a private company. That's what we're working on. And if it takes off, the industry will own it. And the customers are government customers like NASA, ESA, national security customers, commercial customers like pharmaceutical companies, life science companies, or basically customers building microgravity labs. I will use it as a customer. And that's infrastructure investment. And there is precedent for this. Let's go back in time to the late 1990s and early 2000s and ask ourselves who owned a space shuttle with wings. That was the government. That NASA was owned by the government. Then, in the early 2000s, around July 2006, the U.S. government ended the Space Shuttle program. Therefore, it should be privatized. And at some point, the two companies hope to enter into a public-private partnership agreement called a space law agreement. One was Orbital Sciences, and now he owns Orbital ATK, which is owned by Northrop Grumman. They built Cygnus resupply aircraft for about 20 trips to the ISS. And the second company was SpaceX, which was four years old. I had never launched a rocket. And fast forward 15 to 20 years and if you ask someone who owns SpaceX, who owns the rocket, who owns it? No one will say, no government. They say, “So is the company, and so are the investors.” And customers, governments, venture capital-backed satellite companies, tourists, anyone who pays SpaceX as a customer to launch payloads charges a margin. We see it used in applications such as Russia and the Ukraine conflict with Planet and Max, but governments are now buying images from commercial companies. So we have a lot of exciting developments.
Eric White I want to talk a little bit about the past, and then before we talk about the future, I want to go into a little more detail about Voyager's past itself. You've mentioned several times in the past that you're the largest commercial user of ISS. How did you all get here? And, you know, where did you guys start? Where did you guys actually start?
matt kuta Yeah. So Voyager has essentially vertically integrated the core of the space station's supply chain in recent years in anticipation of the U.S. government's consideration of deorbiting the ISS and privatizing it. Over the past few years, Voyager has made a series of his seven acquisitions as part of its space station supply chain strategy. So Voyager itself, the company is only a little over four years old, but Voyager's basic business history, as you know, goes back about 20 to 30 years.
Eric White And what does the future hold now? Earlier, I talked a little bit about how we are preparing for the ISS's deorbit. But, you know, as this moves forward, do you guys yourself plan to move into other areas of space acquisition or work in other areas as we see more activity in the national security space as well?
matt kuta surely. So, as I mentioned, we're doing a lot of work on the ISS right now. We do a lot of work in communication. I think we have more than about 4 million hours of spaceflight in communications technology and in orbit. I think there are about 450 assets in space right now. So when you think about the space station and its replacement, it's a very important program. It's very exciting. It's a strategic asset. This is a demonstration of orbital sovereignty for the United States and its allies. But at the same time, there are many other exciting opportunities within the space sector, and as you know, Voyager is already capitalizing on them. And we're very excited about the continued development of the lunar infrastructure, which is, for lack of a better word, basically a place between Leo and the Moon. A railway track must be built between the Earth and the Moon. A lot of things are happening on the moon. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here and there over the next 10 to 20 years. And of course, it's always close to home. And Leo is like a government agency transferred the investment. Low Earth orbit, geography, and economics, which they have been working on for his 70 years. What we've seen over the past decade has been a slow transition, with NASA and the government now freeing up budgets to go deeper into space. In low Earth orbit, they will hand over the baton and keys to private industry in areas closer to home.
Eric White Matt Kuta is the co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Voyager Space. Read the rest of this interview on our website at Federal News network.com. Search for Space Hour.
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