CyberWire Daily - AWS in Orbit: Data Automation and Space Domain Awareness with Kayhan Space. [AWS in Orbit]

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

You can learn more about AWS in Orbit at space.n2k.com/aws. Our guests today are Araz Feyzi, Co-founder and CTO at Kayhan Space and Tim Sills, Lead Security Solutions Architect at AWS for Aerospace and Satellite. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Be sure to follow T-Minus on LinkedIn and Instagram. Selected Reading AWS Aerospace and Satellite Audience Survey We want to hear from you! Please complete our short survey. It’ll help us get better and deliver you the most mission-critical space intel every day. Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here’s our media kit. Contact us at [e-mail] to request more info. Want to join us for an interview? Please send your pitch to [e-mail] and include your name, affiliation, and topic proposal. T-Minus is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © 2023 N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thank you. Welcome to AWS in Orbit. I'm Maria Varmazes. We're working with AWS to bring you an in-depth look at the transformative intersection of cloud computing, space technologies, and generative AI. On AWS in Orbit, we're exploring not just what's possible, but what's meaningful in the realm of space and cloud innovation. We grapple with the complex challenges and unparalleled opportunities that arise when

we use space to address pressing issues right here on Earth. This is AWS in Orbit, Data Automation and Space Domain Awareness with Kahan Space. We're going to do some introductions. So, Araz, why don't you start first? Tell me a bit about yourself, your background, where you got to be doing what you're doing today. My name is Araz Faizi. I'm the co-founder and chief technology officer at Keon Space. My background is in technology. I got a Commodore 64 when I was in middle school and I fell in love with computers. And since then, I've been using computers to solve any problem

that I seek. That's kind of my hammer. I'm a second-time founder. And what I've focused on my career throughout my career is bringing computer technology to automate processes and streamline processes. That's what I did when I was working for an early-stage company, a Fortune 500 company. When I started my last company and also here, it's the same flavor, different industries solving different problems. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Uh, and Tim over to you, same question. So I'm with, uh, AWS and I'm the lead security solutions architect, um, uh, for the Americas and work with customers, such as the Ross, uh, to, uh, deploy an architect solutions for the cloud and help with security and compliance. And, uh, so yeah, so worked with Arash and his solutions. And so yeah, looking forward to our discussions. Well, thank you both so much for joining me today. Arash, how did Kehan come to be?

Because you mentioned a lot about your computer background, but we're talking also space. So how did those worlds come together and make this incredible company? I'm going to give you the long version of the story. I went to high school with my co-founder, Cia Mac. We went to college together. We were roommates.

We studied engineering. But our passions were different. My passion, as I mentioned, was automation and computers, and his was space. So with that, after that, we both did graduate school and went and worked in semi-pro 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 space industry where we're going from old space to new space. Old space where you, 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 a huge burst of growth in commercial space industry. And 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 path and together we started a company. And the first thing that 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-resolution junction or potential collision 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. As the industry has progressed, that problem has sealed up quite a bit. So fast forward to today, KhanSpace 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 Kehan as Waze 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 orbit with each other when they have prior risk conjunctions or where they want to fly around each other. But it will be recently launched on the product called SatCat.com. It's been a very popular solution. It'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, we can come to SAVCAT and find what they're looking for when it comes to space data. I was just at a satellite security conference and obviously the topic of concern there is just the congestion and all the debris that's being tracked and let alone the future launches that are expected. And so certainly I was pointing people to the SatCat.com site, which can be mesmerizing,

but also to just identify just how severe the situation is. We've seen a tremendous growth in a number of users and the majority of that has been has been organic. We don't run any ads or anything like that, but it's been a hockey stick growth so much so that we had to start rethinking SatGat and see a new future for it. So you'll hear a lot more early next year and going forward from Kehan where SatGat will grow into something a lot bigger than what it is today. Yeah and certainly right I mean that's where the advantage here is with AWS and the scalability right and being able to do that on demand. I know we've talked about that in the past and having that capability, certainly

as you fuse the data from all these different resources. So it definitely provides a very sustainable platform. Yeah, 100%. And actually, let me tell the insider story of SatGat. Our internal team was frustrated by the fact that you had to go to like four, five, six, 10 different websites and web pages and data sources to compile the data that you had to go to like four, five, six, ten 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 and 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. I actually remember the day when you told me you went live and you shared the link. And I think I spent the next two hours at least clicking through like the 3D global view and looking at all the objects and just it was it's mesmerizing to see all the data and all the artifacts that are in flight. I'll add something to that. So what we realized is that 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 is the next ISS going to pass over my head, or oh I heard about this over to the briefing,

why don't you go see what you, 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 thing. 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 we get this and that? So that's not something that we expected. But you can come to Sad Cat with a different goal in mind that 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

And that's what we're trying to kind of fine tune to deliver better experience to different personas more properly. 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? 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 and an infrastructure that's scalable and all that, so that's something that you don't have to worry about. So most of our effort have gone into trying to figure out

what would be the next thing on SatGat from a product perspective, from the capabilities perspective. In reality, it's kind of changed the face of our company. It was a very day and night kind of difference for me. 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 real if they were able to name all the products

that we had, right? But now, if I'm the same kind of interaction with folks, one of the first things that they mention is SatGat. They're like, oh, I did this thing, and SatGat was cool. Or, oh, how's SatGat coming? Or, oh, what's the next thing on SatGat? So kind of SatGat has become the new brand for the company, per se. So yeah, we've really quite a bit of a 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 SatCat and hopefully it will pay out. You mentioned all those different customer personas, all the different use cases. I imagine

for many of them, especially government user security is a high priority. Can you walk me through some of that? Yeah, absolutely. So as a space company, we are serving customers that security is paramount to their daily operations. I mean, it applies to most, I mean, I approach every industry, you know, cyber security is an extremely critical thing. And my previous company wasn't cybersecurity, so obviously from day one, we take that very seriously. What we have done is that obviously we work very closely with AWS team to make sure that we follow the best practices. Back in the day, remember, we had to worry about physical security of the servers.

We had to worry about remoting into servers and keeping them safe. But today, none of that is an issue because, you know, when you're building on AWS, all of that is handled for you and you have a lot less to worry about. And your attack surface is much, much smaller and it's a lot more manageable than before. So, and obviously when you're working with AWS, you have access to different types of offerings. So for commercial customers, we leverage commercial

cloud and that's obviously available globally. For government customers who have such requirements, we use GovCloud. And obviously the security levels are different there. Again, working with the team at AWS has been very helpful. Not only the infrastructure that we get, and this is something that I tell people, is that our experience has been that it's not just a tech stack that we get. We really get access to a ton of other resources around that. So if I have a question, I can reach out to Tim. It'll be very quick to respond.

If I have a policy question, I have access to folks that I can go at AWS and ask. And I can get an answer there if I need to get referral to one of the verified partners. We are a verified partner on the marketplace. But if I need a certain capability, I can go to my point of contacts and ask for introductions. And generally, it's been a really positive experience

coming through a lot of extra effort that we would have done if you didn't have these connections or the support. To Raz's point, though, right, we've worked with them and the team has been quick to understand as well. And they've recognized early on, right, that how using AWS and they accelerate their path to compliance and so with the various security services.

And so without going into great detail of of it though, but they've adopted them and so they know that, you know, they have a strong security posture and strengthen that. And again, it aligns with their scalability requirements as well, right? So you know, that way they're not as they scale out, you know, that security maintains that posture maintains as well. And so, and in as well too, as I always mentioned, I remember again, when we talked about the need to address

and support those government clients and customers where the need to move into GovCloud. And I remember working with them as they started standing up that environment. And we did the same thing, where we worked to enable respective services and align with security and compliance, and so that they're positioned for future needs as well as they

come along. We've been mentioning the word scale a lot, and, Araz, I'm so curious to get your thoughts. Scale is, when we think about the fast, fast-growing number of satellites going into different orbits, I mean, that number is just exploding. But also the complexity of the capability of the satellites going into different orbits. I mean, that number is just exploding, but also the complexity of the capabilities of satellites going into different orbits. That's got to make your job so much more interesting on a whole bunch of different levels.

I'm so curious to get your thoughts about, you know, how you all are sort of getting a handle on all these different increasing capabilities that are happening in orbits, and you know, how you're going to be rising to meet all that. I see two types of scalability problems. One is that you have the steady growth, even though it's a really explosive growth in number of assets,

which kind of increases the complexity of operations by another order of magnitude, it is kind of slow, right? You can see that coming. You have time, you have days, you have weeks, you can adjust. So that's something that most industries are facing where you have some sort of a growth and you have to adapt as you go.

But one thing that also applies to us is kind of like these burst activities. So what I mean by that is if you have an operational system like ours that is mission critical, so if you have a conjunction event, if you have a potential collision in a couple of hours, you need to do something about it right then and there. That, oh, we have the maintenance and we're going to be down for three hours, it's not acceptable. And certain things could happen in an industry that could result in a burst of activity. So no one cares if your system is available when nothing is happening. If you have a mission operation, if a critical system that's in the path of your, in your critical path of

operations, you expect that system to be available when you need it. If you have a situation where a whole bunch of operators and end users need service right then and there, it's important for you to be available then and there. You're doing something right if you can handle that and fix that problem. It's a much bigger problem than just being available on a calm day.

We're always prepared for that day because that day could potentially come. So, you know, we had a breakup in space a few weeks ago, I think, at this point. It was Intel SAT satellite in Geo Station orbit that had unexpected disassembly, created a ton of debris, and so we have all these operators that are concerned about it. You want to rush to catalog those objects, perform conjunction assessment, make sure that they don't pose a risk to your satellites. If so, do something about it. Now, something that's nice about geostationary orbit is things move slowly relative to each other. So you have time. And generally, in most cases,

the interactions are with low relative velocities. These things are kind of like flying around each other or floating around each other. But it's a completely different story in Leo. In Leo, you don't have that luxury. And in geo, if something happened, a catastrophic event like the one that we had happens, it might threaten a smaller number of assets in the short term. But when

we have events like that in Leo, all of a sudden it could potentially affect thousands of satellites within hours. So, you know, we have to be prepared for moments like that. We have to make sure that our services are available under extremely heavy loads. That would have been impossible before AWS. It wasn't feasible for you to secure enough infrastructure for just in case moment, but with when you have access to, you know, practically unlimited resources of all sorts, and they're available to you within seconds, then actually you can develop an infrastructure that you can guarantee that will be available

when it is actually needed. Yeah, and then to those, again, these are great times when we're working with the team to have, I think Rai has mentioned earlier, like availability zones, and so at AWS, we've got regions and within those regions availability zones. And so really this is a resilience. And so having the ability to have workloads that are spread across those availability zones and data centers in those availability zones.

And so this was what he's really referring to is the ability to, you know, it's not only scale out on demand and for supporting customer needs, but as well as to protecting that such that, again, those highly sensitive moments where you need to be able to quickly respond. And certainly in Leo, again, this conference I was just at recently,

it was a topic of discussion because of the expectation of just the amount of new launches, new satellites that will be going up, and thousands and thousands more in the coming years as well, right? So the potential for impact in conjunctions is very high. Yeah, and getting eyes on LEO and getting a really good understanding, situational awareness understanding in LEO is a challenge that comes up a lot. Many people will say, well, I'm very confident about what's going on in Geo, but Leo, I really don't have a sense of it.

So it's a fascinating challenge. It's a fascinating opportunity to use that whole defecation there. I'm so curious about how automation plays in to the vision of what you all are doing. Arash, can you talk to me a little bit about that? Automation and autonomy is at the core of what we do. Again, going back in time a little bit, when we had just under a thousand operational satellites in orbit, you had operators that were very well funded. They had, you know, they could, you know, staff their operations

team, a bunch of PhDs and seasoned space operators and have shifts and all that. And had ample time to respond to situations if they ever, if they had happened. Now it's a very different story today. Now we have a lot more operators. They are much smaller because now you can, you know, you can just raise a few million dollars, develop your satellite, put in a lot of right-hand mission, get it to orbit and operate it. First of all, their time to action is much shorter now because of the congestion in lower Earth orbit. And also, it really doesn't make sense for all these hundreds of hundreds of operators that are, you know, that are launching their constellations to rebuild the same technology over and over.

And I think there are certain parts of the space operations that we've done for so long that really we have it down. We really know how to do these things. And our approach has been that let's use automation and let's use software to automate as much as possible. So if you're a satellite operator, just like you can go to a satellite manufacturer and get them to develop your satellite for you, and then you just have an integrator,

put it in the right channel shown and launch it. Just like that, you should be able to get access to quality software and automated tools that can operate, take care of the majority of the things that human beings are in the loop today and taking care of it. We did that with collision avoidance. We've done that with conjunction assessment, automatic orbit-keeping maneuvers, space traffic coordination,

and we're kind of expanding that to cover more functionalities and more capabilities. We believe that if you're a satellite operator, you should be able to focus on what your mission is and not to have to worry about all these other things that the software can do it for you and automation can do it for you. So we're kind of taking human out of the loop

and we're putting human on the loop so they can supervise the processes instead of manually pushing buttons and manually doing things as much as possible. And I just wanna add onto that too. I mean, we've got a lot of customers in aerospace and satellite that we work with. And so a lot of them, so Rob's just mentioning how they're really, they're focused on mission operations, aerospace and satellite that we work with. And so a lot of them, so Rao's just mentioning how

they're really, they're focused on mission operations, right? What they're trying to deliver to their customers. And so we like to say to AWS, right? Let's remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting. And in this case here, right? Providing servers and architecture and services that Rao's Kaon leverages. But on top of that, for these satellite operators as well

that are focused on their missions, they lean on Kaon for this capability, right? Where they're not having to focus on those aspects that are certainly very significant for operations, but they can focus on the solution for their customers. But when it comes to the environment and managing their constellation, right? This is one of the things that just as we provide these services to Kion, to enable their capabilities, Kion in turn provides those capabilities to their customers as well.

I'll give an example. So let's say you are a company and your focus is, I'm just going to make it edge computing in space. Do you really have to put together a team to figure out how to do early orbit phase of the mission? How to optimally design orbit raising maneuvers and missions? How to deal with conjunction on a daily basis, how to go through all these hundreds of notifications that you really don't have to worry about. So I think the answer is no. All of that can be handled by software for the most part.

I mean, the vast majority of it can be handled. So as a company, as a team, you can actually focus on what you started the company to do, which is edge computing and space. So focus on that and don't worry about all these other things that can be solved by software and automation. That's a fantastic point. It's an efficiency, truly, at the end of the day.

And yeah, let humans do what humans do best. Exactly. I love that. Any parting thoughts we want to leave the audience with? I guess what we're doing here, what we see our mission as an enabler of growth. We're working day and night to solve problems that we believe that are coming up. And we're going to leverage SatGat platform to solve all of those problems.

So, yeah, stay tuned on SatGat. Very cool. Thank you. Tim, same question to you. Any parting thoughts that you want to leave the audience with? Well, I can't wait. I mean, I look forward to what Ken's going to be able to do and develop. And just as he had said, he'll be an enabler for his customers, will be an enabler for him to be able to provide those services and capabilities. And so again, looking forward to it as well. And we'll be monitoring SatGat to see the new developments. Thank you for being a great partner and thank you for enabling us to enable the space industry

to realize its full potential when it comes to growth. And that's it for AWS In Orbit, data automation and space domain awareness with KHAN Space. A special thanks to Araz Faizi and Tim Sills for joining us today. For additional resources from this episode and for more episodes in the AWS In Orbit series, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com slash AWS. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth and powered by AWS. Our AWS producer is Laura Barber.

Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltsman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltsman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iven. Our executive editor is Brandon Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpey is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmasis. Thanks for listening, see you next time. you