DALLAS, Sept. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Minh Nguyen, the 17-year-old co-founder and CEO of Dallas-based aerospace company xOrbita Inc, has been accepted to EWOR, becoming the youngest founder admitted in the fellowship’s history.
EWOR is a radically selective founder fellowship accepting 1 in 1,000 applicants each year. Founders who join EWOR raise $10M on average, and 25 % of fellows who joined in the past six months have raised at nine-figure valuations. 9 of the founders running EWOR full-time have built companies worth $100M to $10B.
Nguyen’s company is building an autopilot for satellites. Operators receive warnings almost daily that two objects in orbit are on course to pass dangerously close, an event the industry calls a conjunction. Deciding what to do about one takes hours. The alert goes to the ground, analysts assess it, a maneuver is planned and approved, and a command is uplinked on the next available pass. The satellite is flying toward the encounter the entire time.
xOrbita’s platform, ARBITER, is built to make that decision on board in seconds. Before launch, the operator sets the rules: how much collision risk is acceptable, which maneuvers the satellite may perform on its own, and where a human must be consulted. ARBITER acts only inside those limits and returns the decision to the ground when it reaches them. Every action it takes is logged and auditable.
“Space doesn’t have a data problem. It has an authority problem,” said Nguyen. “Everyone can see the conjunction coming. The question is who is allowed to act on it, and how fast. We build the layer that lets operators delegate that decision to the spacecraft without giving up control.”
Nguyen co-founded xOrbita with John Avera, an IBM alum and Colonel in the U.S. Army National Guard who previously served as Chief Architect of Air Combat Command’s Federal Laboratory. The two met after Avera came across a paper Nguyen had written on orbital debris and reached out.
The company is targeting its first on-orbit demonstration for July 2027.
About xOrbita: xOrbita Inc is a Dallas-based aerospace company building autonomous decision intelligence for space operations, with authority limits set by the operator and every action auditable. Learn more at xorbita.com.
Contact:
Samantha Jacobson – [email protected] – 646-272-8432
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SOURCE xOrbita
