Moriba Jah

Astrodynamicist, Space Environmentalist

For Dr. Moriba Jah, it started as being a US Air Force Missile Cop in Montana, staring at the night skies and seeing dots of light move across that were satellites. He decided to study Aerospace Engineering and met a professor who believed in him. He ended up in grad school and landed a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab as a Spacecraft Navigator on a handful of Mars Missions. He left JPL to go to the Air Force Research Lab and there he became acquainted with our global space garbage problem. He eventually became a Space Environmentalist and has created the world’s first multi-sourced space traffic monitoring system called ASTRIAGraph, at The University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Moriba Jah is now the director for Computational Astronautical Sciences and Technologies (CAST), a group within the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Lead for the Space Security and Safety Program at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Moriba is a Fellow of multiple organizations: TED, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Astronautical Society (AAS), International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS), Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). He has served on the US delegation to the United Nations Committee On Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN-COPUOS), is an elected Academician of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and has testified to congress on his work as related to Space Situational Awareness and Space Traffic Management. He’s an Associate Editor of the Elsevier Advances in Space Research journal, and serves on multiple committees: IAA Space Debris, AIAA Astrodynamics, IAF Astrodynamics, and IAF Space Security.