As a girl, Melanie Strickland was obsessed with the night sky.

At 10 years old, she would log the satellite she spotted and write letters to NASA.

Today, her startup slingshot aerospace tracks thousands of objects in orbit and using that data assesses risk.

A risk that will only rise.

Whenever I retired from the Air Force in 2017 to start this company. We were tracking about

1800 active satellites. By 2020, there were almost 4,000 and now we're sitting in

2023 with over 10,000. By the end of the decade, we're looking at a 100,000 active satellites on orbit.

And the investment continues to rise even in these economic downturn so that

could even go higher than a hundred thousand but look we've got 300 million

pieces of debris on orbit in this this episode, Slingshot CEO and

co-founder discusses the VC-backed startup, generative AI since space is

poised to become an early use case, and even diversity efforts as March represents Women's History Month.

I'm Morgan Brennan and this is Manifest Space.

So I think let's just start a little bit with what slingshot is and what the

solution you're bringing to the space industry is. Yeah certainly I think it's

undeniable the fact that our human race has really become highly dependent on space and with that high dependency also comes vulnerability because in fact the digital infrastructure necessary to hold

everything that's going up on orbit in the space revolution hasn't really kept up with that advancement.

And so what we do here at Slingshot Aerospace

is we are a space sustainability company.

We really are here to ensure that our customers who fly in those

orbital regimes across defense, commercial, and civil agencies are able to

understand where they are in relation to risk on orbit and that

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