So here's a potential business model for this: salvage rights.
When ships sink, the owner generally still retains ownership of any property. Sometimes the location of the wreck is known. Sometimes it needs to be found. It can cost a lot of money to find a wreck and recover any property.
So salvage rights are a principle of maritime law such that whoever does this is entitled to a reward commensurate with the value of the goods recovered (eg 10%).
I imagine there are orbital slots that are essentially unusable because of space debris (eg Project West Ford [1]). If orbital slots are sufficiently scarce then these could have value. At some point it may become commercial to spend the effort cleaning up an orbit and making it available. Companies could then be compensated for the value they create this way.
I do believe this will still require a dramatic decrease in launch costs, as in orders of magnitude more. But we'll see.
My personal belief (and hope) is that the future of getting into orbit is orbital rings [2]. If so, that completely changes the game because cleaning up an orbit essentially becomes a problem of just holding up a giant "paddle" (for lack of a better word) that is fixed to a point on Earth (essentially) and just letting the debris hit it.
At the speeds those things whiz by, what sort of materials are there that can withstand impacts and not create more debris? Or do they try to do it via relative speeds and say let them hit the "paddle" at 50mph? And in that case, might it not be more effective to have hunting "nets" to collect the objects?
This could work, but would limit effectiveness to the orbits that MUST be very specific to work. For most satellites this doesn't matter. If 500 km is clogged, you design your mission to work at 505 km. I could see something like this working for geostationary orbits and sun-synchronous orbits as they require specific altitudes and inclinations, but not for much else.
This is completely off topic but what accent is the narrator speaking?
He pronounces "research" as "resorch"/"resauch", "greater" as "greator" etc. and in other regards it seems to flip between American to slightly British English.
Even if someone solves the technical part (cheap recovery), there are multiple practical problems with salvaging.
1. Satellites don't have much to salvage at EoL, they are typically obsolete at this point, at least for their main purpose. Their components degrade as well - space is a fairly aggressive environment and they aren't designed to be reusable.
2. They often contain highly regulated components that have tight export restrictions.
3. They might contain state or trade secrets and recovering by a third party is highly undesirable.
Given enough debris at different orbital heights, maybe Woz company can collect it at one location and use it as a launch platform, using the debris as the reaction-mass, then they can use solar power as the energy source to launch to higher orbits, rather than ejecting rocketfuel for thrust. Does this seem feasible? Given certain rocket trajectories, the debris could be made to fall back to earth, solving 2 problems at once - escape velocity energy needs as well as excessive space debris.
*Using space debris as railgun payload, but the railgun (rocket ship) is what you want to accelerate.
Crazy idea: can new satellites be assembled from the parts of old ones: the parts are already in orbit, you can’t reuse chips, but you can reuse solar panels, wires, external walls, etc.
I'm very skeptical of the technical challenges associated with this problem (business model and financing aside). The amount of delta-v required to perform maneuvers to repeatedly "dock" with different pieces of space junk, and then again to de-orbit is very high. You MIGHT be able to de-orbit on the order of magnitude of ~10 pieces of low-earth orbit debris per mission. Maybe. If you're really good. And low-earth orbit junk isn't the major issue since it will de-orbit naturally in a reasonable time-frame. Higher orbit junk is what really matters, and will require much more delta-v to reach, and then again to de-orbit after "docking".
Allow me to blindly speculate here: a space-junk company is going to take one of the two following paths:
1) Perform low-earth orbit missions to de-orbit a few pieces here and then there, use the good PR to drive funding (let's just assume they can make the finances work via getting governments to pay for it or something). It will technically work, but it will only deorbit pieces that would naturally decay anyways at a meaninglessly low-volume. But the PR will be good and regulatory capture will ensure their investors get paid. The real problem will remain.
2) Go after the really big pieces in higher orbits. These pieces tend to be well-tracked and aren't really a large problem, but all the same outcomes in option 1 will occur. Investors will get paid, and of course, the real problem won't be solved.
Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I see space-junk removal companies largely relying on the general public's lack of knowledge on how orbits work to drive PR. Maybe Kerbal Space Program 2 will go viral enough to fix that problem? We can only hope
"The story of Planetes follows the crew of the DS-12 "Toy Box" of the Space Debris Section, a unit of Technora Corporation. Debris Section's purpose is to prevent the damage or destruction of satellites, space stations and spacecraft from collision with debris (so-called "space debris") in Earth's and the Moon's orbits. They use a number of methods to dispose of the debris (mainly by burning it via atmospheric reentry or through salvage), accomplished through the use of EVA suits."
Once you're assigned an orbit space I would assume it'd be your duty to keep it "clean" and as such owners of orbits would need to either do their own cleanup or contract companies like this.
That being said it feels like a company like this is 50 to 100 years too early, but what do I know.
Does anyone else see Wozniak as the headliner and shrug? He has no track-record of successful companies since Apple. Why is this news and why did it hit the front page of HN?
2020: Wozniak’s latest venture is called Efforce and aims to use cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to make it cheaper and easier for companies to fund ‘green’ projects.
2017: Steve "Woz" Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer and inventor of the Apple II computer, announced on Friday the launch of his latest startup, Woz U.
While I don't claim that Wozniak has any business running a space junk cleanup company - I am confused about your requirement that all founders must be serially successful ones for any of their ventures to matter.
Every "space company" has to have a celebrity name attached to it, right? Even if they're not really a celebrity and no one remembers why they were famous.
I'm cynical about the actual need for the proposed service, but I wouldn't begrudge Woz the opportunity to rent his name out for joy or cash.
I still admire the man for his accomplishments and the role he played in shaping the modern world of computing. But I also recognize that his current role is to provide brand recognition for longshot companies.
I'd be interested in seeing a startup he's intimately involved with as a true cofounder. If he's just on board for name recognition/funding I'm less intrigued.
I do. I respect the guy, but this seems like a "me too" (the traditional meaning, as in someone trying to assert "Hey, I'm a player, too"). It's a worthy cause, but I think his major contribution may be his celebrity cache.
Musk has a name re: Space based on accomplishments, hands down. Branson's move extends the Virgin enterprises, and Bezos has a similar business plan and track record as Branson. But now comes Woz, older and much later to the game, and with no background of experience.
His name, face, and personality will bring in investors, though, I'm sure.
I always had this question, though maybe there's a simple answer why nobody is doing this.
Why it's not mandatory to have some smallish engine attached, which at the end of satellite's life would lower the orbit enough until atmosphere picks it up and it will slow down significantly on it's own and burn up?
Is it because most satellites will not fully burn and actually hit the ground, i.e. it's liability?
Is it because of too great of a risk of crossing and colliding with a satellite in another orbit, i.e. liability again?
Is it because "attaching smallish engine" which will fire at satellite's end life is actually really hard thing to do?
The engine is not the problem. It's the fuel. Large orbit changes take a lot. Lowering orbit is not easier than raising orbit, it takes the same delta-v.
IMO what should happen is we should ban putting satellites in high orbits. Satellites in low orbit decay naturally within a few years due to atmospheric drag. Satellites in high orbit will stay there essentially forever. More importantly, any collision in high orbit creates a permanent debris cloud which will spread over time and pollute orbit forever, being essentially impossible to clean up even with sci-fi technology. A collision in low orbit creates a similar debris cloud but it will be naturally cleaned up in a few years or less.
Putting satellites in high orbits made sense back when it was incredibly expensive to launch each satellite, because satellites last longer in high orbit and you don't need as many to cover an area. Also, stationary satellite dishes only work with geostationary satellites, and geostationary orbit is a very high orbit. But today we can use phased arrays to communicate with moving satellites without physically moving a dish, and SpaceX is about to drop launch prices through the floor with Starship, making it feasible to launch enough satellites to cover the Earth even in low orbit and replace them frequently. So to me, the space debris pollution risk of high orbit satellites can no longer be justified.
Well there are other reasons for debris besides just satellites going out of commission. For example in 2007 China deliberately blew up the Fenyun-1C satellite for some kind of research purpose accounting for probably thousands of current pieces of debris up there.
The satellites we put in orbit will naturally have orbits which will decay in a matter of days to hundreds of millions of years. End of life is indeed a consideration for launch approval and many satellites do accelerate their decay with onboard thrust.
Some satellites can’t, would require too much thrust to get back to earth. Some push in to higher orbits to get out of the way for replacement satellites.
Some satellites break in orbit and can’t be controlled.
It will be interesting to see how they are planning to earn money. The only ones willing to expend resources on space cleanup right now seem to be ESA (the European Space Agency).
Reminds me Planetes [0], one of my favourite animes. Hard sci-fi (near future) about a crew working on a satellite debris cleaning business. Great show!
edit: quxbar beat me to it, glad I'm not the only one... The part where they stop by the Moon colony and have fun just bouncing around is pretty great.
What is their business model? This is far from first space debris cleanup company, but regardless of their technical capabilities, all of them are useless until the regulations introduce a requirement for the launch providers and satellite owners to clean their mess.
I wish sometimes I were young enough and less financially constrained enough to allow myself to work for such a company. The thrill of working on something like this with people like this must be immense.
Why was Privateer unveiled in a press release for a 3D titanium alloy printer??
> In a press release for a 3D titanium alloy printer, spotted by Gizmodo, Privateer is described as a “satellite company focused on monitoring and cleaning up objects in space”
> “3D printing with titanium is incredibly valuable in industries like aerospace because of the material’s ability to support complex and lightweight designs,” said Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Privateer Space, a new satellite company focused on monitoring and cleaning up objects in space.*
So many comments here focusing on de-orbiting. Of course for any new satellite, end-of-life de-orbiting should be a part of the initial design, engineering, & build.
However, for existing dead satellites & debris that is above atmospheric decay in reasonable times, I wonder if it would actually be more effective/efficient (in terms of cost, delta-V, scheduling, etc.) to 'herd' the junk into a more out-of-the-way location for future use. It seems once on-orbit manufacturing starts, it'd be useful to have a lot o high-quality material up out of the gravity well, and all of that stuff has already had huge investment to get it to orbit in the first place.
There's no way this works economically. You either need governments to pay for it or you spend your own money in a philanthropic way. Last I checked Woz doesn't have any money left as he gave it all away, so unless he found other people's money to bankroll it, they're going to depend exclusively on governments paying for trash removal. And despite the media's hoopla, orbital debris are an issue, but they're not a huge issue.
A few weeks ago, on the launch of the amazing company Turion Space, I wrote this comment, which I believe still applies here,
-
Congratulations on the launch! I am excited for what you're building. I also love your website. :)
This comment isn't meant to be negative. What you're doing is exciting and amazing. Nothing anyone says should detract from that. However, I have broader questions and (market) skepticism after being around people starting such companies.
Most of the questions here are deal with the technical. But I think you folks will solve that and then some. For those who aren't as familiar with the field, autonomous rendezvous, docking, and servicing has been possible for 15+ years. DARPA's Orbital Express mission autonomously rendezvoused, docked, and replaced a target vehicle's flight computer in 2007, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Express .
My questions mostly revolve around the business side, who is going to pay for it and why?
Here is my current understanding of the issue:
Orbital debris removal is a tragedy of the commons problem which makes who pays for it and why muddled in the best of circumstances. The market situation right now is not the best of circumstances. Currently, to the best of my knowledge, there is no single stakeholder who is impacted enough to unilaterally take action. It isn't a pain point - yet. Most of the valuable orbits, like the sunsynchronous orbits do not have enough debris to degrade service. The most valuable orbit - GEO - is managed actively to avoid service degradation through debris.
The debris that does exist is mostly from the Chinese Anti-Satellite weapons test + the Cosmos + Iridium conjunction event. This debris is concentrated around the 750km to 850km, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-cataloge... and these orbits aren't valuable enough for this to be a concern, as of now.
There is some concern around the mega-constellations, but SpaceX's constellation will be at around the 550km mark. If the worst does happen, and we have a cascade, then all the debris will be deorbit itself in less than a decade. And it - most likely - won't significantly impact any other services except in a ±20km altitude of the cascade. Kuiper will be at 630km, so that is likely to take longer (the orbital lifetime for an object w.r.t. altitude is an exponential one), but it is manageable.
OneWeb's constellation is more worrying at 1,2000km, but AFAICT, they won't send up enough assets for it to be a significant concern. Space is big after all.
Furthermore, no country has - so far - ever, without express permission, rendezvoused, docked, and altered the orbit of an object by another country. Someone involved with UNOOSA put it to me this way, you can look all you want, but you can't touch. You can come close to another country's satellite, you two can peak at each other, take photos of one another, try and measure the other's payload etc. But you can't do a hard (or soft) capture of one another, because that is a declaration of war. IANAL, but short of getting a contract with the Chinese Govt. you can't actually address the largest source of space debris - it would be an act of war. For debris where the ownership is muddled or the organization is no longer extant, the "how much are people willing to pay for this" factor doesn't seem to eclipse the "will this cause diplomatic incident/spark a war" factor. It doesn't seem like a profitable beehive to poke.
As far as I can see, there isn't a single stakeholder with an orbital debris hair on fire problem right now. All of my friends who have started a company around debris have ended up pivoting into the satellite servicing market, much in the same way as you indicate. However, even there there are concerns that make the problem domain difficult for a successful business to operate in.
The hard capture business is the national security business. You can see that with Momentus. I am unaware of any other industry where such a thing happens, but the DoD explicitly had the company remove its Russian CEO and had him divest all of his assets before allowing the company to proceed with operations,
> In-space transportation company Momentus says its Russian co-founders are now “completely divested” from the company as it reaches a national security agreement with federal agencies.
> In March, Momentus announced that Kokorich and Brainyspace LLC, the company owned by Khasis and his wife, had put their shares into a voting trust and would divest them within three years. The move, the company said, was in response to correspondence from the Defense Department in January “stating Momentus posed a risk to national security as a result of the foreign ownership and control of Momentus by Mikhail Kokorich and Lev Khasis and their associated entities.”
More privately, I have noticed that all of the startups that have made a viable autonomous rendezvous, docking, and servicing system seem to go dark. I'm guessing this usually coincides with substantial DoD interest and money. As they seem to be the largest (and perhaps only) customer right now.
I would be surprised if Turion Space, as an American company, would be allowed to - legally or otherwise - to service Chinese assets. Based on personal experience, I just don't see that happening short of something extraordinary. Servicing European assets might also fall under some fairly onerous restrictions.
Maybe companies launching smallsats and cubesats might hire you for extending the service lifetime of their missions, but if launch costs truly decrease, then it might be cheaper for them to send up a new mission with better tech than have you service it.
Is my understanding of the market correct? If so, this brings me back to my original question, who is this for? And why will they buy it?
I believe that you can succeed. But I don't know if the market exists yet for you to succeed.
-
Space Debris feels like the sitcom startup idea of the space age. It's a problem everyone outside of the space thinks exists, but most people in the space know that it doesn't yet exist. At least not in the way that it can be solved by a private entity - so far.
I might be wrong and I would be extremely happy if it turns out that I am indeed wrong.
[+] [-] wongarsu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|4 years ago|reply
When ships sink, the owner generally still retains ownership of any property. Sometimes the location of the wreck is known. Sometimes it needs to be found. It can cost a lot of money to find a wreck and recover any property.
So salvage rights are a principle of maritime law such that whoever does this is entitled to a reward commensurate with the value of the goods recovered (eg 10%).
I imagine there are orbital slots that are essentially unusable because of space debris (eg Project West Ford [1]). If orbital slots are sufficiently scarce then these could have value. At some point it may become commercial to spend the effort cleaning up an orbit and making it available. Companies could then be compensated for the value they create this way.
I do believe this will still require a dramatic decrease in launch costs, as in orders of magnitude more. But we'll see.
My personal belief (and hope) is that the future of getting into orbit is orbital rings [2]. If so, that completely changes the game because cleaning up an orbit essentially becomes a problem of just holding up a giant "paddle" (for lack of a better word) that is fixed to a point on Earth (essentially) and just letting the debris hit it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
[+] [-] laumars|4 years ago|reply
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/
[+] [-] mc32|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SonicScrub|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quelltext|4 years ago|reply
He pronounces "research" as "resorch"/"resauch", "greater" as "greator" etc. and in other regards it seems to flip between American to slightly British English.
Never heard this accent before.
[+] [-] orbital-decay|4 years ago|reply
1. Satellites don't have much to salvage at EoL, they are typically obsolete at this point, at least for their main purpose. Their components degrade as well - space is a fairly aggressive environment and they aren't designed to be reusable.
2. They often contain highly regulated components that have tight export restrictions.
3. They might contain state or trade secrets and recovering by a third party is highly undesirable.
[+] [-] genericone|4 years ago|reply
*Using space debris as railgun payload, but the railgun (rocket ship) is what you want to accelerate.
[+] [-] mch82|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thornygreb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] failuser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SonicScrub|4 years ago|reply
Allow me to blindly speculate here: a space-junk company is going to take one of the two following paths:
1) Perform low-earth orbit missions to de-orbit a few pieces here and then there, use the good PR to drive funding (let's just assume they can make the finances work via getting governments to pay for it or something). It will technically work, but it will only deorbit pieces that would naturally decay anyways at a meaninglessly low-volume. But the PR will be good and regulatory capture will ensure their investors get paid. The real problem will remain.
2) Go after the really big pieces in higher orbits. These pieces tend to be well-tracked and aren't really a large problem, but all the same outcomes in option 1 will occur. Investors will get paid, and of course, the real problem won't be solved.
Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I see space-junk removal companies largely relying on the general public's lack of knowledge on how orbits work to drive PR. Maybe Kerbal Space Program 2 will go viral enough to fix that problem? We can only hope
[+] [-] theshrike79|4 years ago|reply
"The story of Planetes follows the crew of the DS-12 "Toy Box" of the Space Debris Section, a unit of Technora Corporation. Debris Section's purpose is to prevent the damage or destruction of satellites, space stations and spacecraft from collision with debris (so-called "space debris") in Earth's and the Moon's orbits. They use a number of methods to dispose of the debris (mainly by burning it via atmospheric reentry or through salvage), accomplished through the use of EVA suits."
Basically space garbage men =)
[+] [-] crabmusket|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0afc375b5|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vasco|4 years ago|reply
Once you're assigned an orbit space I would assume it'd be your duty to keep it "clean" and as such owners of orbits would need to either do their own cleanup or contract companies like this.
That being said it feels like a company like this is 50 to 100 years too early, but what do I know.
[+] [-] andjd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|4 years ago|reply
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/technology/apple-co-founde...
2017: Steve "Woz" Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer and inventor of the Apple II computer, announced on Friday the launch of his latest startup, Woz U.
https://www.inc.com/business-insider/steve-woz-wozniak-apple...
[+] [-] yunohn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h2odragon|4 years ago|reply
I'm cynical about the actual need for the proposed service, but I wouldn't begrudge Woz the opportunity to rent his name out for joy or cash.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newman8r|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|4 years ago|reply
Even naysayers took time to read &/| post.
[+] [-] edm0nd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eplanit|4 years ago|reply
Musk has a name re: Space based on accomplishments, hands down. Branson's move extends the Virgin enterprises, and Bezos has a similar business plan and track record as Branson. But now comes Woz, older and much later to the game, and with no background of experience.
His name, face, and personality will bring in investors, though, I'm sure.
[+] [-] zohch|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quxbar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trymas|4 years ago|reply
Why it's not mandatory to have some smallish engine attached, which at the end of satellite's life would lower the orbit enough until atmosphere picks it up and it will slow down significantly on it's own and burn up?
Is it because most satellites will not fully burn and actually hit the ground, i.e. it's liability?
Is it because of too great of a risk of crossing and colliding with a satellite in another orbit, i.e. liability again?
Is it because "attaching smallish engine" which will fire at satellite's end life is actually really hard thing to do?
Something else?
[+] [-] modeless|4 years ago|reply
IMO what should happen is we should ban putting satellites in high orbits. Satellites in low orbit decay naturally within a few years due to atmospheric drag. Satellites in high orbit will stay there essentially forever. More importantly, any collision in high orbit creates a permanent debris cloud which will spread over time and pollute orbit forever, being essentially impossible to clean up even with sci-fi technology. A collision in low orbit creates a similar debris cloud but it will be naturally cleaned up in a few years or less.
Putting satellites in high orbits made sense back when it was incredibly expensive to launch each satellite, because satellites last longer in high orbit and you don't need as many to cover an area. Also, stationary satellite dishes only work with geostationary satellites, and geostationary orbit is a very high orbit. But today we can use phased arrays to communicate with moving satellites without physically moving a dish, and SpaceX is about to drop launch prices through the floor with Starship, making it feasible to launch enough satellites to cover the Earth even in low orbit and replace them frequently. So to me, the space debris pollution risk of high orbit satellites can no longer be justified.
[+] [-] stemlord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|4 years ago|reply
The satellites we put in orbit will naturally have orbits which will decay in a matter of days to hundreds of millions of years. End of life is indeed a consideration for launch approval and many satellites do accelerate their decay with onboard thrust.
Some satellites can’t, would require too much thrust to get back to earth. Some push in to higher orbits to get out of the way for replacement satellites.
Some satellites break in orbit and can’t be controlled.
[+] [-] advisedwang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|4 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit
[+] [-] wongarsu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inasio|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
edit: quxbar beat me to it, glad I'm not the only one... The part where they stop by the Moon colony and have fun just bouncing around is pretty great.
[+] [-] shantara|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larsiusprime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggggtez|4 years ago|reply
Your satellite crashes? Pay us to clean it up.
[+] [-] danpalmer|4 years ago|reply
I give it a year before a SPAC buys them for billions and makes them public. It's crazy how much demand there is for space companies at the moment.
[+] [-] Roritharr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|4 years ago|reply
> In a press release for a 3D titanium alloy printer, spotted by Gizmodo, Privateer is described as a “satellite company focused on monitoring and cleaning up objects in space”
Here is the press release:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210804005651/en/Des...
> “3D printing with titanium is incredibly valuable in industries like aerospace because of the material’s ability to support complex and lightweight designs,” said Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Privateer Space, a new satellite company focused on monitoring and cleaning up objects in space.*
[+] [-] toss1|4 years ago|reply
However, for existing dead satellites & debris that is above atmospheric decay in reasonable times, I wonder if it would actually be more effective/efficient (in terms of cost, delta-V, scheduling, etc.) to 'herd' the junk into a more out-of-the-way location for future use. It seems once on-orbit manufacturing starts, it'd be useful to have a lot o high-quality material up out of the gravity well, and all of that stuff has already had huge investment to get it to orbit in the first place.
Any astro engineers have any insights?
[+] [-] mlindner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepybrett|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] areoform|4 years ago|reply
-
Congratulations on the launch! I am excited for what you're building. I also love your website. :)
This comment isn't meant to be negative. What you're doing is exciting and amazing. Nothing anyone says should detract from that. However, I have broader questions and (market) skepticism after being around people starting such companies.
Most of the questions here are deal with the technical. But I think you folks will solve that and then some. For those who aren't as familiar with the field, autonomous rendezvous, docking, and servicing has been possible for 15+ years. DARPA's Orbital Express mission autonomously rendezvoused, docked, and replaced a target vehicle's flight computer in 2007, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Express .
My questions mostly revolve around the business side, who is going to pay for it and why?
Here is my current understanding of the issue:
Orbital debris removal is a tragedy of the commons problem which makes who pays for it and why muddled in the best of circumstances. The market situation right now is not the best of circumstances. Currently, to the best of my knowledge, there is no single stakeholder who is impacted enough to unilaterally take action. It isn't a pain point - yet. Most of the valuable orbits, like the sunsynchronous orbits do not have enough debris to degrade service. The most valuable orbit - GEO - is managed actively to avoid service degradation through debris.
The debris that does exist is mostly from the Chinese Anti-Satellite weapons test + the Cosmos + Iridium conjunction event. This debris is concentrated around the 750km to 850km, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-cataloge... and these orbits aren't valuable enough for this to be a concern, as of now.
There is some concern around the mega-constellations, but SpaceX's constellation will be at around the 550km mark. If the worst does happen, and we have a cascade, then all the debris will be deorbit itself in less than a decade. And it - most likely - won't significantly impact any other services except in a ±20km altitude of the cascade. Kuiper will be at 630km, so that is likely to take longer (the orbital lifetime for an object w.r.t. altitude is an exponential one), but it is manageable.
OneWeb's constellation is more worrying at 1,2000km, but AFAICT, they won't send up enough assets for it to be a significant concern. Space is big after all.
Furthermore, no country has - so far - ever, without express permission, rendezvoused, docked, and altered the orbit of an object by another country. Someone involved with UNOOSA put it to me this way, you can look all you want, but you can't touch. You can come close to another country's satellite, you two can peak at each other, take photos of one another, try and measure the other's payload etc. But you can't do a hard (or soft) capture of one another, because that is a declaration of war. IANAL, but short of getting a contract with the Chinese Govt. you can't actually address the largest source of space debris - it would be an act of war. For debris where the ownership is muddled or the organization is no longer extant, the "how much are people willing to pay for this" factor doesn't seem to eclipse the "will this cause diplomatic incident/spark a war" factor. It doesn't seem like a profitable beehive to poke.
As far as I can see, there isn't a single stakeholder with an orbital debris hair on fire problem right now. All of my friends who have started a company around debris have ended up pivoting into the satellite servicing market, much in the same way as you indicate. However, even there there are concerns that make the problem domain difficult for a successful business to operate in.
The hard capture business is the national security business. You can see that with Momentus. I am unaware of any other industry where such a thing happens, but the DoD explicitly had the company remove its Russian CEO and had him divest all of his assets before allowing the company to proceed with operations,
> In-space transportation company Momentus says its Russian co-founders are now “completely divested” from the company as it reaches a national security agreement with federal agencies.
> In March, Momentus announced that Kokorich and Brainyspace LLC, the company owned by Khasis and his wife, had put their shares into a voting trust and would divest them within three years. The move, the company said, was in response to correspondence from the Defense Department in January “stating Momentus posed a risk to national security as a result of the foreign ownership and control of Momentus by Mikhail Kokorich and Lev Khasis and their associated entities.”
https://spacenews.com/russian-co-founders-out-of-momentus/
More privately, I have noticed that all of the startups that have made a viable autonomous rendezvous, docking, and servicing system seem to go dark. I'm guessing this usually coincides with substantial DoD interest and money. As they seem to be the largest (and perhaps only) customer right now.
I would be surprised if Turion Space, as an American company, would be allowed to - legally or otherwise - to service Chinese assets. Based on personal experience, I just don't see that happening short of something extraordinary. Servicing European assets might also fall under some fairly onerous restrictions.
Maybe companies launching smallsats and cubesats might hire you for extending the service lifetime of their missions, but if launch costs truly decrease, then it might be cheaper for them to send up a new mission with better tech than have you service it.
Is my understanding of the market correct? If so, this brings me back to my original question, who is this for? And why will they buy it?
I believe that you can succeed. But I don't know if the market exists yet for you to succeed.
-
Space Debris feels like the sitcom startup idea of the space age. It's a problem everyone outside of the space thinks exists, but most people in the space know that it doesn't yet exist. At least not in the way that it can be solved by a private entity - so far.
I might be wrong and I would be extremely happy if it turns out that I am indeed wrong.
[+] [-] mfer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]