This conversation is grounded in lived operational history. Simon Reid implemented the world’s first satellite operations automation system for EUMETSAT in 1990, and three decades later led the first commercial in-orbit AI automation platform with AWS and ESA, a system later used for real experiments by third parties. What follows isn’t speculation about AI in space, but insight shaped by decades of building systems that actually fly.Space is no longer a distant frontier. It is critical infrastructure.In this episode of BASELINE, Ian speaks with Simon Reid, CTO at Space DOTS, about why modern space systems have become too complex for humans to manage alone and what that means for satellites, data, trust, and decision-making.As Low Earth Orbit becomes more crowded and more contested, the risks are no longer just physical collisions. They include invisible threats such as radiation, signal interference, degradation, spoofing, and cascading failure across systems we depend on every day.Simon explains how the space industry is undergoing a quiet shift:from hardware-first thinking to data-first systems,from manual oversight to machine-driven inference,and from isolated sensors to aggregated, trust-based intelligence.
