Kayhan Space has named seasoned military and space intel veteran Mark Mueller as Vice President of Government Growth to lead the company’s development and delivery of Space Domain Awareness (SDA) and Action plus Offensive and Defensive Space Control solutions for a range of classified and unclassified government missions.
Mueller brings more than 35 years of experience in the US Government Intelligence Community, Air Force, and Space Force, including Chief of Space Intelligence Data for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Most recently, he served as senior advisor to USNORTHCOM and USSPACECOM at Peterson SFB in Colorado, where he directed the deployment of worldwide Command, Control, and Intelligence sharing capabilities with allied nations. He has played pivotal roles throughout his government career in understanding adversarial threats through data and space analytics that ultimately provided key defensive and offensive capabilities in space.
Mueller joins Kayhan Space as the company strategically ramps up next-generation automation and high-performance computing to enable the US and its allies to easily integrate autonomous SDA capabilities and optimized courses of action with their operations.
“Mark is joining Kayhan Space at a pivotal and strategic time, as we intensify our collaborative work with US Government civil and military agencies to advance vital national space and intelligence capabilities,” said Siamak Hesar, Kayhan Space Co-Founder and CEO. “Our highly scalable mission modeling and simulation solutions are already providing government missions with real-time threat assessment and threat mitigation action plans, and we are on track with an aggressive roadmap aimed at providing warfighters with rapid decision-making aid in space.”
Kayhan Space was recently awarded an Office of Space Commerce contract to provide active data curation, as part of a pathfinder effort under the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). This critical work will help define quality indices to meet necessary accuracy and precision in support of spaceflight safety. Kayhan Space has completed multiple research and development programs for the US Government, including extensive work in support of the US Space Force and as a participant in Cohort 2 in the SDA Tools, Applications, and Processing (TAP) lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The objective of this effort is to demonstrate a complete end-to-end capability supporting the defense of critical National Security space assets.
“I’m honored to join the Kayhan Space executive team at such a critical time, as the US Government looks to accelerate its space domain awareness and national security initiatives with proven autonomous capabilities from trusted commercial partners,” explained Mark Mueller, Vice President of Government Growth for Kayhan Space. “Kayhan Space has built its spaceflight automation solutions with integration across SDA in mind, and we have successfully demonstrated running our core software platforms in classified environments and are ready and well-positioned to meet mission-critical government requirements in space.”
Kayhan Space also announced other key hires across the team, including Brandon DeWick as Director of Engineering, a role focused on the development of world-class software solutions for some of the most complex challenges in space.
“I’m thrilled to lead the Kayhan Space engineering team, as we empower our commercial and government customers, inundated with complex operational challenges, to concentrate on their important missions. We help them take on spaceflight safety requirements seamlessly and effectively with simplified platforms,” said DeWick, who has led software system development for Maxar, Digital Globe, and Mangata Networks.
Kayhan’s Pathfinder space traffic coordination (STC) platform is a scalable and autonomous solution that collects and fuses space object data from various sources, leverages precise orbit prediction algorithms to determine upcoming conjunction events with high accuracy. The solution also automatically alerts operators of potential threats with actionable and ready-to-execute maneuver plans