In the Beginning: Wayfinder and its Architects

The big question was asked for the first time in 2006, beneath a wide and starry sky on the island of Maui, at a time when human dependence on space was rapidly accelerating.

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Privateer co-founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Moriba Jah, then an Air Force Research Lab developer, was hard at work on an application that would use small telescopes to help the United States government understand the population of junk in space. At the time, the widely used Department of Defense catalog tracked about 26,000 space objects in total – just 1,200 of them in operation. 

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The rest? Garbage.

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Garbage about which we had very limited information, and whose continued orbits around the Earth threatened the critical operations of still-working satellites.

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“That was a 'holy crap' moment for me,” Moriba says. “What could I do about it?”

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So were planted the seeds for what would become the world’s most comprehensive database for objects in space.

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“At the time, there wasn’t one place to see different aspects and answer questions about stuff in space,” he recalls. “Part of my research at the AFRL was to figure out how to track things better. My goal was to eventually develop a database that would complement or augment the DoD’s to track and show this stuff in real time. For a lot of reasons, I didn’t have the freedom to do that in government – so I tried to do it with an academic hat.”

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At the University of Texas at Austin, where he became a leading professor of astrodynamics, Moriba incorporated data from sources as varied as the DoD, Russian research institutions, and amateur astronomers into a successful proof of concept named AstriaGraph.

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Then, he heard from Alex Fielding and Steve Wozniak (yes, that Steve Wozniak 🍎), who had their own increasing concerns about the sustainability of the space environment and the itch to form a company that could address the problem.

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“When I met up with Alex and Steve, I had the idea for Privateer as something that could lend itself to improving space sustainability, among other things,” Moriba says. “AstriaGraph was able to transition into a commercial product.

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“That was the birth of Wayfinder.” 

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Privateer intended to turn the endless volume of raw data about events on Earth and in space into an accessible product for problem-solvers everywhere. For the three co-founders, tracking and representing the entirety of satellite activity in space in one place was the first step. 

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And so, Wayfinder became the company’s flagship application.

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Today, it serves as a best-in-class space visualization platform, displaying roughly 36,000 space objects in various Earth-centered orbits and provides the ability to search for specific space objects by name or other attributes. Users can select space objects to view data such as orbital characteristics, identifiers, countries of origin, and to view and download the results of operations such as collision prediction and satellite brightness predictions for a specific location and time.

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“We licensed AstriaGraph initially and effectively ended up reimplementing the whole thing and launched a new platform, from scratch,” says Privateer Chief Technical Officer Mike Moskwinski. “Then we started adding to it – adding conjunction predictions, adding OEM generation, giving it five days of prediction for the position of space objects.”

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These predictions mean Wayfinder effectively shows where objects in space are and where they’re going to be in up to five days, drawing from a mass of data curation and anomaly detection. 

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The application has thus evolved into a platform for not just object identification and tracking, but one whose growing list of features helps satellite operators to protect their assets and maneuver them more efficiently, astronomers to plan observations around satellite interference, and any curious Earthbound mind to understand things like how much it might cost to remove space debris or what’s going on with the International Space Station.

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“This ability to predict five days out is at the root of all the use cases we’re implementing: conjunction analysis, dynamic tasking, optimization of buying satellite images,” Mike says of today's Wayfinder as a foundational tool for space data. “It’s a tool that can be used for in-space satellite services and other ideas that will all come within the next two or three years, as that part of the space economy builds up.”