Stanford Alum Startup Helps Us Dodge Space Debris
In New York, Miami Beach / Heavy metal fell, in Cuba, Angola, Saudi Arabia / On Christmas Eve, said NORAD / A Soviet sputnik, hit Africa / India, in Venezuela / In Texas, Kansas / It’s falling fast, Peru too / It keeps coming, it keeps coming, it keeps coming – from Devo – “Space Junk,” 1978
The new startup, LeoLabs, co-founded by Stanford Graduate School of Business alum Alan DeClerck, is helping the commercial space industry navigate debris and space junk floating around low Earth orbit.
LeoLabs tracks more than 1,000 objects per hour, which “Its partners and customers access that data through a LeoLabs software platform.” DeClerck, LeoLab’s VP of Business Development and Strategy, is grateful for the opportunity to “go deep—on space data, on the physics of LEO, and on an emerging ecosystem.”
He helps to explains the current moment: “Achieving what’s known as space situational awareness is critical for defense, communications, and human space flight. “There’s a gold rush to put new satellite services up there, but the question is how can we secure these service against a backdrop of man-made debris moving at 17,500 mph?”
LeoLabs got its start with an NSF grant to build a radar array in Fairbanks, Alaska to help study the ionosphere—the area between 250-1,250 miles above the planet “critical for commercial services on Earth as well as for staging missions deeper into space.” The team discovered “noise” from low Earth orbit debris, which they reckoned might be valuable to detect and track.
DeClerck elaborates: “Everybody wants this data. Commercial firms need debris mitigation plans for their satellites. Government space agencies want the data for situational awareness and regulatory reasons. After launch, space debris is the number one operational risk, and those operations are really important to the security of the country because so much of our security relies on satellites. There’s billions of investment dollars at stake, so the market for us is considerable.”
DeClerck says LeoLabs is “building the network that provides the ability to map space in LEO” to accommodate companies like SpaceX, OneWeb, and Blue Origin. Their data is also useful to military and government clients—often simultaneously. Air Force data from “a 2009 collision between a Soviet satellite and a U.S.-built commercial satellite … highlighted the need for better collision-avoidance data” and proved beneficial to NASA.
DeClerck hopes that LeoLabs’ platform “can empower universities, startups, and app builders with space data.”
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
