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.read-more { display: flex; justify-content: right; font-weight: 700; font-family: var(--font-centra); color: #000000; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px; letter-spacing: 1.4px; text-transform: uppercase; flex-wrap: nowrap; } /* Stronger selector to override other styles */ .read-more a { white-space: nowrap; border-bottom: 5px solid transparent !important; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; } /* .read-more a:hover, .read-more a:focus { color: black !important; border-bottom-color: black !important; text-decoration: none !important; } */ .read-even-more { display: flex; justify-content: right; font-weight: 700; font-family: var(--font-centra); color: #000000; font-size: 13px; line-height: 14px; letter-spacing: 1.4px; text-transform: uppercase; flex-wrap: nowrap; padding-top: 8px; } /* Stronger selector to override other styles */ .read-even-more a { white-space: nowrap; border-bottom: 5px solid transparent !important; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none !important; } /* .readeven-more a:hover, .read-even-more a:focus { color: black !important; border-bottom-color: black !important; text-decoration: none !important; } */ The biggest story in tech is AIs increasing capacity to take on tasks once reserved for human beings. But the agents driving that change arent machines. Theyre humansinventive, ambitious, enterprising ones. Our third annual roundup of some of the fields most intriguing players includes scientists and ethicists, CEOs and investors, big-tech veterans and first-time founders. These 20 innovators are tackling challenges from training tomorrows AI models to speeding drug discovery to reimagining everyday productivity tools. Household names theyre not. Yet, theyre already changing our world, with much more to come. [Illustration: Oriana Fenwick] Michelle Pokrass Technical Staff Member, OpenAI Last year, OpenAI decided it had to pay more attention to its power users, the ones with a knack for discovering new uses for AI: doctors, scientists, and coders, along with companies building their own software around OpenAIs API. And so the company turned to post-training research lead Michelle Pokrass. Read profile [Illustration: HelloVon; source image: Carlton Canary] Rachel Taylor Product Manager, Sesame Rachel Taylor began her career as a creative director in the advertising business, a job that gave her plenty of opportunity to micromanage the final product. I had control of the script, she remembers. I could think about the intonation, and I could give the actor notes. Read profile [Source photo: Joelle Grace Taylor] Naeem Talukdar Cofounder and CEO, Moonvalley The rise of AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood may have been a stunt, but Hollywood is indeed embracing generative AI, a threat to those who owe their livelihoods to the movies. Still, AI could also expand a filmmakers creative vision by creating ambitious scenes or effects too pricey to shoot, says Naeem Talukdar, CEO of the video-generation model developer Moonvalley. Read More Every project you see on the big screen is a result of an endless amount of creative compromises from the directors and the filmmakers, he says.Moonvalley, which has raised $154 million, works with four of Hollywoods biggest studios, advising them on how to integrate AI into productions and reskill workers. Its model is trained on licensed, high-resolution content and is capable of production-grade video generation.Over the past year, Moonvalley has shifted its focus to developing world models, which geneate video that accurately portrays the complex physics of something like a car crash. As these models grow, says Talukdar, they start to be able to reason on things that they havent seen before. Mark Sullivan [Illustration: Oriana Fenwick; source image: Google Deep Mind] Koray Kavukcuoglu Chief AI Architect, Google For years, Google has employed many of AIs brightest minds. Yet it was burdened with a reputation for ineffectiveness when it came to turning its breakthroughs into products. Recently, however, CEO Sundar Pichai has made dramatic moves to overcome that unfortunate legacy. A big one came in June 2025 when he named Koray Kavukcuoglu the companys first chief AI architect. Read More A onetime Google summer intern and veteran of DeepMind, the British AI startup Google acquired in 2014, Kavukcuoglu helped manage the 2023 merger of DeepMind and Google Brain, another research arm. He remains CTO of the combined entity, Google DeepMind, but now he reports directly to Pichai, who announced the promotion in a memo explaining that Kavukcuoglus new role would bring more seamless integration, faster iteration, and greater efficiency to Googles lab-to-market pipeline. Hundreds of staffers working to apply Googles Gemini large language model to transform its search engine are now part of his team, The Information reported. Hes also involved with everything from data center strategy to bolstering the Google Cloud web services platform. Kavukcuoglus background is in the science of AI, not turning it into offerings that appeal to billions of people. Still, as Gemini-powered features increasingly show up in Google mainstays such as search, Android, and Gmail, investors have grown more optimistic that Google will be a titan of the AI era rather than a victim of it. As the company strives to keep that momentum going, Kavukcuoglus deep familiarity with its technical stack should be an asset. Theres a long history of research that built up to this point, he told Big Technologys Alex Kantrowitz last May. Harry McCracken [Illustration: HelloVon] Justine and Olivia Moore Partners, Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz investors (and identical twins) Justine and Olivia Moore have been in venture capital since their days at Stanford University, where, in 2015, they cofounded an incubator to help students pursue business ideas. Read profile [Illustration: HelloVon; source photo: Bee Lavender] Byron Cook VP and Distinguished Scientist, Amazon Hallucinations are baked into the way generative AI works, but that doesnt mean we have to live with them. Byron Cooka vice president and distinguished scientist at Amazon Web Servicesrealized that an alternative AI technology called automated reasoning could be the perfect way to keep chatbots confabulations in check. Read More The product he spearheaded in 2024, called Automated Reasoning Checks, acts like Mr. Spock for language models, using rigid logic to catch and correct up to 99% of hallucinations.Now Cook is applying automated reasoning to agents: autonomous, LLM-powered enterprise apps. Many businesses dont trust themyet. First of all, this [agent] could lie to me, explains Cook. But secondly, if I let it launch rocketshis metaphor for irreversible actionswill it launch rockets when were not supposed to?” Amazon is betting that automated reasoning, and Cook, can keep agents on a leash. John Pavlus Read Feature Article [Source photo: Abridge] Shiv Rao Cofounder and CEO, Abridge A cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Shiv Rao is the cofounder of Abridge, an AI-driven platform that records doctorpatient conversations in real time. The AI works across more than 100 languages and can distinguish when a doctor, patient, or translator is speaking to make the most accurate records. Read More Abridge is also integrated into medical platforms such as Athenahealth and Wolters Kluwer, where it can fill out forms and expedite tasks like insurance pre-authorization or writing prescriptions.Rao, who has experience as a tech investor with UPMC, developed the idea while making his rounds. His hospitals proximity to Carnegie Mellon, a tech hub, gave him a firsthand look at machine learning. That led him to found his company in 2018, long before ChatGPT came around. Abridge, which has raised a total of approximately $800 million, is currently in use at more than 150 U.S. health systems, including Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, and Duke Health. The less time physicians spend on paperwork, the more time they have to focus on their patients.As a doctor, Im not compensated for the care that I deliverIm compensated for the care that I documented that I deliver, Rao says. So we are extending the documentation to help with billing. Yasmin Gagne [Illustration: Oriana Fenwick; source image: Kyle Fish] Kyle Fish Research Scientist, Anthropic What if the chatbots we talk to every day actually felt something? What if the systems writing essays, solving problems, and planning tasks had preferences, or even something resembling suffering? And what will happen if we ignore these possibilities? Those are the questions Kyle Fish is wrestling with as Anthropics first in-house AI welfare researcher. Read profile [Source photo: Kelly Nyland] Kanjun Qiu Cofounder and CEO, Imbue Before most people started thinking about generative AI, Imbue cofounder and CEO Kanjun Qiu was worrying about its future. Qiu had established a co-living community in San Francisco called the Archive, where she counted among her housemates several working in AI, providing her with an early sense of how AI might further consolidate power among the big tech companies. Read More Theres this growing sense that both digital technology and AI are happening to people, theyre not necessarily happening with us or for us, she says.Imbue, which emerged from stealth in late 2022, aims to help people create their own AI tools. Its working on an AI-assisted software development tool called Sculptor, which became open to public preview in late September.What were trying to do is create a tool that lets you feel the structure of your software and understand it, says Qiu, by enabling it to remember context across different projects and suggesting ways to refine users code. While other AI software development startups such as Bolt and Replit offer stand-alone products, Sculptor acts as an interface for Claude Code, allowing developers to run multiple agents in parallel. Jared Newman [Source photo: Chloe Jackman Photography] Paula Goldman Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer, Salesforce Before Paula Goldman became Salesforces first in-house ethicist in 2019, she earned a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. That training remains central to her work at the business software giant, which now includes helping product teams se guardrails for AI behavior, testing tools for safety, and engaging policymakers on trustworthy AI. Read More Goldman had already been immersed in these questions at eBay founder Pierre Omidyars impact investment firm, where she evaluated the social consequences of emerging technology. Goldman is now helping refine Salesforces ethical principles around the deployment and testing of generative AI and agentic tools. Her team has helped develop systems to ensure AI follows instructions, avoids toxic behavior, and stays within established ethical guidelines.Those types of tools are increasingly important as AI takes on more autonomy, she says. You want to make sure that the person thats setting up the system is able to see in advance what its going to produce.But while cloud technology has continued to evolve, Goldman says one thing has not: establishing trust with customers. Obviously, we are a business, and being commercially successful is very important, she says. Also, we know that trust is what makes that possible. Steven Melendez [Illustration: HelloVon; source photo: Lee Towndrow] Tara Feener Head of Engineering, the Browser Company You might not spend a lot of time thinking about your web browser. But the decades-old app remains an important canvas for getting things done. Thats why Tara Feener, who spent years developing creative tools at the likes of Adobe and Vimeo, joined the Browser Company. Within two years, she was head of engineering for its AI-forward Dia browser. Read profile Read Q&A Dean Ball Senior Fellow, Foundation for American Innovation In Washingtons scramble to govern artificial intelligence, few have had as much influence as Dean Ball. A former research fellow at the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, Ball was the principal author of the AI Action Plan, which the White House released in July. Read More Depending on whom you ask, the document will either secure the United States lead in AI or unleash reckless proliferation.The plan focuses on accelerating innovation through deregulation, streamlining the construction of data centers, and driving the adoption of American-made AI tools abroad. It includes popular provisions like embracing open-source AI, along with divisive ones such as requiring federal agencies to work only with LLM developers whose AI models are free from top-down ideological bias and withholding AI funding from states that pass AI laws the administration deems burdensome.Even as the industry has praised the document, critics have panned it for failing to curb AIs potential harms, such as discriminatory system biases. But avoiding assumptions about AIs future is the point, says Ball, who left the White House in August and is now a fellow at the conservative Foundation for American Innovation. Washingtons really bad at forecasting how technology will develop, he says. We dont want to make those mistakes. Issie Lapowsky [Illustration: Oriana Fenwick; source photo: Waabi] Raquel Urtasun Founder and CEO, Waabi After decades of AI research, Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun believes she has learned how to build a better self-driving truck. Urtasun began her career in academic research about 25 years ago, focusing much of it on autonomous-driving technologies such as object detection. There was a lot of innovation that needed to happen in order to enable the revolution that we see today, she says. Read More Following a stint as chief scientist at Ubers self-driving car unit, Urtasun launched Waabi in 2021 to build a verifiable, human-interpretable AI model for autonomous driving. Waabi-enabled big rigs have been on pulic roads since 2023 and are slated for driverless operation by the end of 2025. Though many autonomous truck systems are limited to highways and depots, Waabis technology is designed to carry goods all the way to their final destinations on surface streets. The company has raised more than $280 million to date.Urtasun also remains a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, where her graduate students conduct doctoral research at Waabi through a unique arrangement. Some recent research involves simulation, allowing Waabi to now let its AI practice in situations its never encountered in the physical worlda key advantage for its system.Waabis AI has shown that it can quickly react to novel conditions, even seamlessly managing its first encounter with rain, which it had never practiced for. It was kind of nerve-racking, says Urtasun, who was in that vehicle with some investors. But it was amazing to see. Steven Melendez Read Q&A [Source photo: Karrie Karahalios] Karrie Karahalios Professor, MIT Media Lab For years, the feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have devoured our attention. Mediated by opaque algorithms, they reduce users to passive consumers of content whose likes and shares tell the platform how to keep them scrolling and viewing ads. Karrie Karahalios is well-known for her research on the fairness of these social algorithms, studying their inputs and outputs. Read More Since joining the MIT Media Lab in September, she has been expanding her research into ways of empowering individuals and communities to fight back against algorithmic overreach. This has led her to focus on contestable systems, which let human users talk back to algorithms, perhaps to contest a content moderation decision that may at first seem final. This could be through a set of preference settings to control the content of a social feed, or it might be through an AI voice or chat interface that allows a user to engage the algorithm in a plain language dialogue. If no solution is reached, the issue might be bumped up to a human moderator.As we build these systems, and they seem to be permeating our society right now, one of my big goals is not to ignore human intuition and not to have people give up agency, Karahalios says. Mark Sullivan [Illustration: HelloVon; source photo: Lisa DeNeffe] Rodrigo Liang Cofounder and CEO, SambaNova Systems Why arent more chips designed to reduce the huge amount of power used by AI data centers? Rodrigo Liang, SambaNovas cofounder and CEO, compares traditional GPUs to a cook that prepares each dish individually. SambaNovas Reconfigurable Dataflow Units (RDUs), in contrast, operate like an assembly line that processes each part of an AI request in sequence. Read More RDUs compete with traditional GPUs for AI inferencethe application of trained models to new data that happens when we use AI apps. The goal: to slash inference power requirements, while also reducing latency. Customers with strict privacy requirements can run servers with SambaNovas RDUs on site, or they can have the company manage them in the cloud. We found it hard to believe that we had to rely on an architecture that was started 25 years ago, 30 years ago, and primarily focused on graphics and gaming, Liang says.SambaNova raised $676 million at a $5.1 billion valuation in April 2021, yet challenges remain, most notably the dominance and mindshare of large players such as Nvidia. Still, Liang believes SambaNovas advantages will accrue with AIs increasing power and performance demands. All the things that weve designed natively into the product are going to become more and more important, he says. Jared Newman David Kossnick Senior Director and Head of AI Products, Figma Before David Kossnick joined Figma, he was one of the design platforms millions of users and full of ideas for improving it. In March2024, he was named to oversee the companys AI productsa key element of its growth strategy after its August 2025 IPOoffering him the chance to do more than daydream about its future. Read More The fruits of Kossnicks labor are more and more apparent. AI features now span Figmas portfolio, from its flagship Design app to the new Make vibe coding tool to features for creating slideshows, websites, and marketing assets. Given Figmas inherently multidisciplinary naturetwo-thirds of its users work in areas outside designthe technology can knock down some of creativitys traditional boundaries, he asserts: Its easier with the help of AI to reach into a lane where youre not as familiar with the details and bring the context, the intuition, the insight that you have.At the same time, the company has been careful not to mess up elements of its experiences that people liked in the first placewhich means that some of its best AI is nearly invisible, at least until users know they want it. Figma Designs canvas is kind of like the Google homepage or Facebook newsfeed, says Kossnick. A single pixel of friction literally slows down millions of people every day. Harry McCracken Read Q&A [Illustration: Oriana Fenwick] Kimberly Powell VP of Healthcare, Nvidia Bringing new drugs to market requires decade-long, multibillion-dollar journeys, with a high failure rate in the clinical trial phase. Nvidias Kimberly Powell is at the center of a major effort to apply AI to the challenge. If you look at the history of drug discovery, weve been kind of circling around the same targets for a long time, and weve largely exhausted the drugs for those targets, she says. Read profile Read Q&A Sonia Kastner Cofounder and CEO, Pano AI From mountaintop perches across 13 states, Pano AIs cameras scan the horizon, searching for wisps of smoke that humans might overlook for hours. Todays fires are spreading much more quickly, says CEO Sonia Kastner, who cofounded Pano AI in 2020. You dont have time for slow detection, slow assessment, slow buildup of resources. Read More Panos system detects wildfires in a median of 3.5 minutesrevolutionary compared with traditional 911 alert times. It triangulates fire locations within hundreds of meters and alerts multiple agencies at once.Kastners eight-person AI team has spent five years training models to spot fires and distinguish smoke from dust or clouds. Quietly, computer vision has gotten really, really good, she says. While enterprises (and more and more states) have embraced the systemthe company has secured more than $140 million in cumulative contracts and raised a $44 million funding round in Junefederal adoption remains the biggest hurdle. To that end, Kastner frequently travels to Washington to push agencies to modernize procurement. Were serving as a bridge between the technology sector and emergency managers on the front lines of these ever-worsening natural disasters, she says. Jeremy Caplan [Illustration: HelloVon] Jonathan Siddharth Cofounder and CEO, Turing In early 2023, Jonathan Siddharth foresaw the coming AI arms race. He expanded the mission of his company, Turing, a recruiting platform that matched companies with remote workers. We went from finding smart software engineers to finding smart humans in every field and building a platform that could extract that human knowledge and skills and distill it into an LLM, he says. Read More Today, Turingsupplies training data for eight of the nine companies developing the largest general-purpose AI models. The shift has also turned Turing into a quiet but central player in the artificial intelligence ecosystem, shaping what the next generation of AI systems will know. Turing is profitable and valued at roughly $2.2 billion.As models have advanced, generic data (often scraped from the web) is no longer good enough to achieve further intelligence gains. AI researchers need a regular supply of data that captures deep subject-matter expertise across domains from STEM to healthcare, Siddharth says. Were able to do that because we have two engines: the talent engine thats finding smart talent and the data generation platform that the talent works on. Mark Sullivan
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Amid an uncertain economythe growth of AI, tariffs, rising costscompanies are pulling back on hiring. As layoffs increase, the labor market cools, and unemployment ticks up, were seeing fewer people quitting their jobs. The implication: Many workers will be job hugging and sitting tight in their roles through 2026. Put more pessimistically: Employees are going to feel stuck where they are for the foreseeable future. In many cases, that means staying in unsatisfying jobs. Gallups 2025 State of the Global Workforce report shows that employee engagement has fallen to 21%. And a March 2025 study of 1,000 U.S. workers by advisory and consulting firm Fractional Insights showed that 44% of employees reported feeling workplace angst, despite often showing intent to stay. So if these employees are hugging their current roles, its not an act of affection. Its often in desperation. Being a job hugger means youre feeling anxious, insecure, more likely to stay but also more likely to want to leave, says Erin Eatough, chief science officer and principal adviser at Fractional Insights, which applies organizational psychology insights to the workplace. You often see a self-protective response: Nothing to see here, Im doing a good job, Im not leaving. This performative behavior can be psychologically damaging, especially in a culture of layoffs. If I was scared of losing my job Id try everything to keep it: complimenting my boss, staying late, going to optional meetings, being a good organizational citizen, says Anthony Klotz, professor of organizational behavior at the UCL School of Management in London. But we know that when people arent loving their jobs but are still going above and beyond, that its a one-way trip to burnout. The tight squeeze In cases where jobs arent immediately under threat, the effects of hugging are more likely to be slow burning. When an employees only motivation is to collect a consistent paycheck, discretionary effort drops. Theyre less productive. Engagement takes a huge hit. Over time, that gradually chips away at their well-being. Humans want to feel useful, that they care about the work theyre doing, and that theyre investing their time well, Eatough says. When efforts are low, that can impact a persons sense of value. The effects stretch beyond the workplace, too. Frustrated and reluctant stayers can quickly end up in a vicious cycle, Klotz says, noting, When youre in a situation that feels like its sucking life out of you, you end up ruminating about how depleting it is, then end up so tired that you dont have energy for restorative activities outside of work. So its this downward spiralyou begin your workday even more depleted. Longer term, job hugging stunts growth. When youre looking out for yourself, rather than the team or organization, your investment in working relationships begins to break down, Eatough says. Over time, staying in that situation means youre more likely to become deeply cynical, which hurts the individual and their career trajectory. When hugging becomes clinging Feeling stuck is nothing new. At some point in their careers, most workers will be in a situation where if they could leave for a better role, they would, says Klotz, who predicted the Great Resignation. But what distinguishes job hugging is that its anxiously clinging to a role during unfavorable labor markets. Its not that employees dont want to quitits that they cant. Its human nature that when theres a threat of any sort that we move away from it and towards stability, Klotz says. Your job represents that stability. And currently, its not a great time to switch jobs. There are few options for job huggers. The first is speaking up and working with a manager to improve the situation. But this might be unlikely for employees who feel trapped or lack motivation in the first place. Klotz says cognitive reframing can helpfocusing purely on the positive aspects of a draining role, such as a friendly team, and tuning out the rest. Finally, slowly backing away from extra tasksin other words, quiet quittingcould mean workers can redraw work-life boundaries in the interim at least. Otherwise, beyond Stoic philosophy or a benevolent boss, there is little choice but to wait it out. In some cases, a job hugger may eventually turn it around, ease their grip, and become quietly content in their role. But more often, wanting to quit usually leads to actually quitting. In effect, job hugging is damage control: hanging on until the situation changes. I think well see some people be resilient, wait it out, and find another role, Klotz says. But therell be others in the quagmire of struggling with exhaustion of spending eight hours a day in a job they dont like.
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The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and cloud services has led to a massive demand for computing power. The surge has strained data infrastructure, which requires lots of electricity to operate. A single, midsize data center here on Earth can consume enough electricity to power about 16,500 homes, with even larger facilities using as much as a small city. Over the past few years, tech leaders have increasingly advocated for space-based AI infrastructure as a way to address the power requirements of data centers. In space, sunshinewhich solar panels can convert into electricityis abundant and reliable. On November 4, 2025, Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, a bold proposal to launch an 81-satellite constellation into low Earth orbit. It plans to use the constellation to harvest sunlight to power the next generation of AI data centers in space. So instead of beaming power back to Earth, the constellation would beam data back to Earth. For example, if you asked a chatbot how to bake sourdough bread, instead of firing up a data center in Virginia to craft a response, your query would be beamed up to the constellation in space, processed by chips running purely on solar energy, and the recipe sent back down to your device. Doing so would mean leaving the substantial heat generated behind in the cold vacuum of space. As a technology entrepreneur, I applaud Googles ambitious plan. But as a space scientist, I predict that the company will soon have to reckon with a growing problem: space debris. The mathematics of disaster Space debristhe collection of defunct human-made objects in Earths orbitis already affecting space agencies, companies, and astronauts. This debris includes large pieces, such as spent rocket stages and dead satellites, as well as tiny flecks of paint and other fragments from discontinued satellites. Space debris travels at hypersonic speeds of approximately 17,500 mph in low Earth orbit. At this speed, colliding with a piece of debris the size of a blueberry would feel like being hit by a falling anvil. Satellite breakups and anti-satellite tests have created an alarming amount of debris, a crisis now exacerbated by the rapid expansion of commercial constellations such as SpaceXs Starlink. The Starlink network has more than 7,500 satellites providing global high-speed internet. The U.S. Space Force actively tracks more than 40,000 objects larger than a softball using ground-based radar and optical telescopes. However, this number represents less than 1% of the lethal objects in orbit. The majority are too small for these telescopes to identify and track reliably. In November 2025, three Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station were forced to delay their return to Earth because their capsule had been struck by a piece of space debris. Back in 2018, a similar incident on the International Space Station challenged relations between the U.S. and Russia, as Russian media speculated that a NASA astronaut may have deliberately sabotaged the station. The orbital shell Googles project targetsa sun-synchronous orbit approximately 400 miles above Earthis a prime location for uninterrupted solar energy. At this orbit, the spacecrafts solar arrays will always be in direct sunshine, where they can generate electricity to power the onboard AI payload. But for this reason, sun-synchronous orbit is also the single most congested highway in low Earth orbit, and objects in this orbit are the most likely to collide with other satellites or debris. As new objects arrive and existing objects break apart, low Earth orbit could approach Kessler syndrome. In this theory, once the number of objects in low Earth orbit exceeds a critical threshold, collisions between objects generate a cascade of new debris. Eventually, this cascade of collisions could render certain orbits entirely unusable. Implications for Project Suncatcher Project Suncatcher proposes a cluster of satellites carrying large solar panels. They would fly with a radius of just 1 kilometer, each node spaced less than 200 meters apart. To put that in perspective, imagine a racetrack roughly the size of the Daytona International Speedway, where 81 cars race at 17,500 mph while separated by gaps about the distance you need to safely brake on the highway. This ultradense formation is necessary for the satellites to transmit data to each other. The constellation splits complex AI workloads across all its 81 units, enabling them to think and process data simultaneously as a single, massive, distributed brain. Google is partnering with a space company to launch two prototypesatellites by early 2027 to validate the hardware. But in the vacuum of space, flying in formation is a constant battle against physics. While the atmosphere in low Earth orbit is incredibly thin, it is not empty. Sparse air particles create orbital drag on satellites; this force pushes against the spacecraft, slowing it down and forcing it to drop in altitude. Satellites with large surface areas have more issues with drag, as they can act like a sail catching the wind. To add to this complexity, streams of particles and magnetic fields from the sunknown as space weathercan cause the density of air particles in low Earth orbit to fluctuate in unpredictable ways. These fluctuations directly affect orbital drag. When satellites are spaced less than 200 meters apart, the margin for error evaporates. A single impact could not only destroy one satellite but also send it blasting into its neighbors, triggering a cascade that could wipe out the entire cluster and randomly scatter millions of new pieces of debris into an orbit that is already a minefield. The importance of active avoidance To prevent crashes and cascades, satellite companies could adopt a leave no trace standard, which means designing satellites that do not fragment, release debris, or endanger their neighbors, and that can be safely removed from orbit. For a constellation as dense and intricate as Suncatcher, meeting this standard might require equipping the satellites with reflexes that autonomously detect and dance through a debris field. Suncatchers current design doesnt include these active avoidance capabilities. In the first six months of 2025 alone, SpaceXs Starlink constellation performed a staggering 144,404 collision-avoidance maneuvers to dodge debris and other spacecraft. Similarly, Suncatcher would likely encounter debris larger than a grain of sand every five seconds. Todays object-tracking infrastructure is generally limited to debris larger than a softball, leaving millions of smaller debris pieces effectively invisible to satellite operators. Future constellations will need an onboard detection system that can actively spot these smaller threats and maneuver the satellite autonomously in real time. Equipping Suncatcher with active collision-avoidance capabilities would be an engineering feat. Because of the tight spacing, the constellation would need to respond as a single entity. Satellites would need to reposition in concert, similar to a synchronized flock of birds. Each satellite would need to react to the slightest shift of its neighbor. Paying rent for the orbit Technological solutions, however, can go only so far. In September 2022, the Federal Communications Commission created a rule requiring satellite operators to remove their spacecraft from orbit within five years of the missions completion. This typically involves a controlled de-orbit maneuver. Operators must now reserve enough fuel to fire the thrusters at the end of the mission to lower the satellites altitude, until atmospheric drag takes over and the spacecraft burns up in the atmosphere. However, the rule does not address the debris already in space, nor any future debris, from accidents or mishaps. To tackle these issues, some policymakers have proposed a use tax for space debris removal. A use tax or orbital-use fee would charge satellite operators a levy based on the orbital stress their constellation imposes, much like larger or heavier vehicles paying greater fees to use public roads. These funds would finance active debris-removal missions, which capture and remove the most dangerous pieces of junk. Avoiding collisions is a temporary technical fix, not a long-term solution to the space debris problem. As some companies look to space as a new home for data centers, and others continue to send satellite constellations into orbit, new policies and active debris-removal programs can help keep low Earth orbit open for business. Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti is an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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