Moriba Jah

Moriba Kemessia Jah (born 1971) is an American space scientist and aerospace engineer who describes himself as a "space environmentalist". Jah is adamant about finding solutions to the accumulating garbage in space. He specializes in orbit determination and prediction, especially as related to space situational awareness and space traffic monitoring. He is currently a full professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, a position he attained in 2024, and a National Geographic Explorer. Jah has co-founded Privateer Space x Orbital Insight, GaiaVerse, and Moriba Jah Universal. His work now broadly focuses on decision intelligence to improve the stewardship of the planet and beyond.

In 2024, Privateer Space acquired Orbital Insight, a satellite imagery analytics company, following Series A Funding. Jah has authored a number of academic papers, including Entropy-based approach for uncertainty propagation of nonlinear dynamical systems. Jah previously worked as a spacecraft navigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was involved in navigation for the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mars Exploration Rover, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He is a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society, the Air Force Research Laboratory, the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, and the Royal Astronomical Society. Jah was selected for the 10th anniversary class of TED Fellows and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022. He also was selected for the AIAA class of Fellows and Honorary Fellows in the year of the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11. Jah's work has been featured in Nature, Popular Science, and National Geographic.

Early life and education

Jah was born in San Francisco, California, to Elsie Turnier from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, and Abraham Jah from Pujehun, Sierra Leone. Jah's parents divorced when he was two years old. He moved to Venezuela at the age of six. After graduating, Jah moved back to the United States and enlisted in the United States Air Force where he served as a Security Policeman. He was inspired to become an astrodynamicist by Ron Madler. He later spent a year at the Los Alamos National Laboratory working on space mission design. During his PhD he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a navigation engineer, developing the navigation algorithms and performing orbit determination for several missions, including the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey and Mars Exploration Rover. His doctoral thesis looked at aerobraking spacecraft, using an Unscented Kalman Filter to estimate the spacecraft trajectory to explore ways to automate aerobraking operations. He was then awarded the NASA Space Act Award for his work on the Inertial Measurements for Aero-assisted Navigation (IMAN), in 2007.

Career In 2007 Jah joined the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). At Kirtland Air Force Base, Jah was mission lead in Space Situational Awareness and advised the satellite guidance and control program. There he focused on building models of space debris that quantify the space object population.

Jah has stated that the United States Strategic Command cannot accurately track all satellites, and their current data could be biased, noisy and corrupt. He gave formal congressional testimony to the Federal government of the United States in 2017, discussing a Civil Space Traffic Management system. He stated that he believes that the USSC should create a global, accessible, and transparent space traffic management system, which would protect spacecraft from debris and a lack of monitoring. He was appointed as Core Faculty to the University of Texas at Austin Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences in 2018 where he directs the Computational Astronautical Sciences and Technologies group (CAST). He has discussed astrodynamics and space policy on NPR, The BBC and National Geographic.

At The University of Texas at Austin, Jah is a Distinguished Scholar with the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. In 2024, Jah was promoted to full professor. Jah's published works include the areas of space situational awareness, space traffic management, spacecraft navigation, space surveillance and tracking, multi-source information fusion, and intersection with space security and safety. He has previously served as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and is currently for the Elsevier Advances in Space Research. In 2021, Jah co-founded Privateer Space with Steve Wozniak and Alex Fielding, where he serves as chief scientist.

On January 5 2023, Jah was appointed by the Secretary of Defense to the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

Awards, elections and fellowships + Year Award2001 NASA Group Achievement Award and Aviation Week & Space Technology Laurel Award "for the superb navigation of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to Mars" 2010 Elected to Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2011 Elected to Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 2013 Air Force Research Laboratory, Space Vehicles Directorate Technology Transfer/Transition Achievement Award 2014 Elected to Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society 2014 Elected to Fellow of the American Astronautical Society 2015 Elected to Fellow of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety 2015 Elected to Fellow of the Air Force Research Laboratory 2016 University of Colorado Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award (DEAA) 2018 Elected as Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Astronautics 2019 Selected as TED Fellow 2019 Conferred as Fellow by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics "For thought leadership and innovative technical contributions in the fields of space situational awareness, space traffic management, and astrodynamics." 2019 Selected as one of 25 "People racing to save us" of WIRED25 by the Wired (magazine) " 2020 Selected as a Public Voices Fellow by the Op-Ed Project 2022 MacArthur Fellow