Privateer

Privateer, founded in 2021 and headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii, is a space sustainability and space domain awareness company co-founded by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Alex Fielding, building a comprehensive, open-data orbital catalog and analytics platform to address the growing space debris crisis threatening the long-term viability of near-Earth orbital operations.

Privateer's core mission is aggregating and correlating space object tracking data from disparate sources — US Space Force's Space-Track catalog, commercial SSA providers (LeoLabs, ExoAnalytic), radar networks, optical telescopes, and ultimately Privateer's own planned sensor satellites — into a unified orbital object database that is more complete, more current, and more accessible than any single source. The company's Wayfinder platform presents this data through visualization tools and APIs that satellite operators, government agencies, researchers, and insurers can use to assess conjunction risks, plan debris avoidance maneuvers, and model long-term orbital environment evolution.

Privateer is developing a dedicated constellation of small sensor satellites (Explorer spacecraft) to directly observe resident space objects in LEO, collecting data on debris pieces too small or too irregular for ground-based radar networks to catalog reliably. These space-based optical observers would address a critical gap: an estimated 500,000+ orbital debris objects between 1-10 cm are too small to track but large enough to cause catastrophic satellite damage, and they are invisible to current Space-Track reporting.

The Hawaiian headquarters reflects Wozniak's lifestyle preferences and Hawaii's proximity to Asia-Pacific space stakeholders, while the company's open data philosophy — making orbital awareness information broadly accessible rather than proprietary — aims to create a space sustainability commons. Privateer competes with LeoLabs, ExoAnalytic Solutions, and Numerica in the commercial SSA market, differentiating through the open data mission and celebrity co-founder profile that drives media attention to space sustainability issues.