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On this edition of The Ex Terra Podcast, Tom Patton talks with Moriba Jah about the challenges of orbital debris as more and more satellites are launched into space.

Moriba Jah is an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin where he is the holder of the Mrs. Pearlie Dashiell Henderson Centennial Fellowship in Engineering. He recently joined Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak\'s startup venture Privateer as Chief Scientific Advisor.

The challenges of orbital debris can be daunting. According to an ESA document dated January 5th of this year, there are some 36,500 objects of 10 cm or larger currently in Earth orbit. And while the threat of collisions is real, Professor Jah says that is not the root of the problem. "We don\'t even have a census of this human-made or anthropogenic space object population. We can\'t measure the whole thing. There\'s a bunch of stuff that is untrackable ... there\'s like random bullets up there."

Professor Jah says that the biggest challenge in understanding the population of orbital debris is a lack of shared data. To combat that problem, Professor Jah developed "Astriagraph", which is meant to be a multi-source, crowdsource database of space objects. Before we can address the problem, we have to know what\'s there.

Professor Jah also talks about Privateer and its efforts to address the challenges of orbital debris. It\'s all on this edition of the Ex Terra Podcast.

How does what happens in space affect your everyday life? The Ex Terra podcast is dedicated to introducing you to many of the interesting people involved in the commercial space industry, and taking you behind the scenes with many of the companies making significant contributions to the new space economy. The podcast is available on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Breaker, Overcast, Pocketcasts and Radio Public.