Brien Flewelling

Advisory Committee on Excellence in Space (ACES) Representative
Member – ExoAnalytic Solutions

Dr. Brien R. Flewelling is the Director of Strategic Program Development at ExoAnalytic Solutions, a private U.S. company that tracks the position and behavior of satellites using the oldest and largest commercial network of privately funded and maintained optical telescopes (more than 400 autonomous telescopes installed at 37+ locations worldwide).  A well-respected thought leader on the data challenges confronting the growth of the space industry and the challenge of maintaining a safe operating environment for spaceflight against the growing threats of debris or adverse behavior.  As an aerospace professional with government, academic, and industry experience, he has been recognized in each of those sectors for his technical leadership and advocacy including receiving a Rotary National Award for Space Achievement (RNASA). In a 2020 Space News opinion piece, he wrote that, with global activity now reaching out to a space volume encompassing “the Earth, moon, and Lagrange points”, referred to as “cislunar space”, requires enhanced management of an area where spacecraft may operate within what could become a $10 trillion space economy.  This presents space planners with the need to grapple with a situational awareness challenge for an expansion of space volume 1,000 times greater than the volumes currently in use. Flewelling is also well known for his work in informing the world about the first use of what has been referred to as a Chinese “space tug” wherein he and ExoAnalytic were the first to identify a Chinese satellite “grabbing another long-dead satellite and days later throwing it into a ‘graveyard’ orbit 3000 km away, where objects are less likely to hit spacecraft.”

Today, Flewelling leads engagement and technical development focused providing enhanced flight safety support services including enabling increasingly ambitious space operations like on-orbit servicing, and developing advanced value-added services for space traffic management which address modern complications to space tracking problems like mega-constellation traffic and extensions of SDA capabilities into the Cislunar Regime