PiLogic CEO Johannes Waldstein joined Harrison Lambert on the Space Times podcast for a long conversation about what exact AI actually does on a spacecraft. Most of the discussion sits on the engineering rather than the pitch: where threshold-and-rule monitoring runs out, why a model that fits curves to data struggles with the failures nobody has seen before, and what it takes to run probabilistic reasoning on a flight computer rather than a ground server.
It is a good listen if you have ever watched a satellite drop into safe mode and spent the next two days working out which sensor lied.
In the conversation
- 00:21What exact AI is, and why PiLogic started with fault detection rather than something easier to demo.
- 05:55Human-on-the-loop autonomy. Why an operator needs the reasoning, not just the verdict.
- 10:10Outputs that are probabilistic and deterministic at the same time, and why that pair is not a contradiction.
- 11:38Turning a block diagram into a model, and catching an invalid design on the way through.
- 21:12The technical stretch: Bayesian networks compiled down to arithmetic, and what fits on a flight computer.
- 31:44Resolve, and why radar tracking became the second product.
- 39:29The SpaceWERX awards, and the work with Starcloud and Sophia Space.
Harrison also presses on the commercial side: how government programs like SBIR, STTR and CRADA move a technology from prototype toward production, why insurers care about onboard diagnostics, and what changes when there are more satellites in a fleet than people watching them.
The full episode runs 46 minutes. It is on YouTube, and the show publishes at spacetimespod.com.
PiLogic builds Exact AI — exact probabilistic reasoning for mission-critical aerospace and defense. Its models, Manifest (satellite diagnostics) and Resolve (radar tracking), compute correct, explainable answers in milliseconds, onboard, on existing hardware, with no training data and no hallucination. PiLogic works with the Air Force Research Laboratory under a two-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement and is backed by Scout Ventures, Seraphim Space, Sovereign's Capital, Flex Capital, and FN Fund. For more information, visit pilogic.ai.