Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/apple-founder-wozniak-space-debris-company-b1919747.html

by notRobot • 5 years ago

804 245 5 years ago

independent.co.uk

Tajnymag• 5 years ago

Yes, please

danpalmer• 5 years ago

"Private space company"

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.

wongarsu2• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/9YLSb

wongarsu2• 5 years ago

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).

ndr• 5 years ago

They might be betting on some upcoming regulation.

aero-glide2• 5 years ago

They should lobby for a law requiring companies to deorbit satellites after EOL.

SonicScrub10• 5 years ago

Requiring de-orbiting at EOL would destroy their business no? Also EOL de-orbiting works great for low-altitude orbits, but becomes exponentially more difficult with higher orbits. It is pretty much impossible with the very valuable geostationary orbital slots.

C19is20• 5 years ago

Under what/ which/ whos jurisdiction?

loonster• 5 years ago

Maybe they will also become an insurance company to insure satellites from spatial debris.

eatmyshorts2• 5 years ago

I think that will change very quickly when we have a collision in space. I imagine SpaceX, for instance, would be pretty interested in cleaning up space junk if two of their LEO satellites collide.

myself2483• 5 years ago

the point of SpaceX putting things into LEO (which we should really call SLEO or something, because it's super-low) is that the orbits are self-clearing on a reasonable timescale, months or single-digit years.

GEO is likewise not a problem because things out there are really far apart and they generally don't cross each other's orbits.

MEO (where GNSS services live) is the real danger. Thankfully there aren't a ton of objects there, but deorbiting the dead ones should be a very high priority on anyone's list.

mlindner7• 5 years ago

would be pretty interested in cleaning up space junk if two of their LEO satellites collide.

SpaceX satellites are passively de-conflicted. Which means that the orbits are planned such that the satellites never can be at the same place at the same point in time. But yes SpaceX does care a lot about debris in their orbital shell.

academia_hack2• 5 years ago

If they can make this tech viable, DOD will buy it as an ASAT weapons capability with essentially a blank check. Debris removal is a fantasy veneer slapped on to space weapons development for investors.

shantara3• 5 years ago

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.

ggggtez• 5 years ago

Presumably, government contracting.

Your satellite crashes? Pay us to clean it up.

piker• 5 years ago

or don't, and leave it there?

shantara3• 5 years ago

Why would I pay a cleaning company instead of spending a lot less money on moving the satellite into a graveyard orbit before it runs out of propellant?

panzagl• 5 years ago

Given that the largest source of man-made debris is Chinese, I don't see that happening.

larsiusprime• 5 years ago

Lobby for pigouvian taxes on the creators of space junk and contract to fix the problem, getting paid out of that fund?

klausjensen• 5 years ago

I googled it so you do not have to...:

"A Pigovian (Pigouvian) tax is a tax assessed against private individuals or businesses for engaging in activities that create adverse side effects for society."

silent_cal5• 5 years ago

This space stuff is such a waste. There is enough garbage on the surface of the earth to worry about. Just nerd grifting IMO.

decremental• 5 years ago

The issue with space debris is that on our current trajectory, at some point in the future, there will be so much debris traveling so fast that future space exploration will be impossible because we'll never get anything off the planet. Not to mention we won't be able to have satellites. Possibly a nerd grift but the issue is important.

WastingMyTime893• 5 years ago

The issue with space debris is that on our current trajectory, at some point in the future, there will be so much debris traveling so fast that future space exploration will be impossible

The issue is keeping things in orbit not space exploration. Realistically going through is never going to be a problem. The worst that might happen is that you need some monitoring and manoeuverability on-board of your spacecraft but it's not insurmountable. Even near Earth, space is that big.

Staying there with a lot of debris flying around really fast that could become impossible.

HyperLinear• 5 years ago

Its called the Kessler syndrome. Small fast moving debris crashing into larger fast moving debris destroying it creating even more smaller fast moving debris that keeps crashing into more debris etc etc etc.

silent_cal5• 5 years ago

Then we should stop shooting junk into outer space. I don't see why this is so complicated.

croon• 5 years ago

Space debris is exponential. It only takes one piece getting a good hit on a satellite to create thousands more.

h2odragon4• 5 years ago

one piece getting a good hit on a satellite to create thousands more.

... and then what happens? Most of those pieces retain their location and momentum. "Blowing up a satellite" converts it into a cloud of smaller particles in the same orbit, possibly with some random spray, but this is not quite like billiard balls without friction.

ud_03• 5 years ago

There is enough garbage on the surface of the earth to worry about.

Every single time there is anything happening with space flight, there is at least one comment saying "We should literally solve every single problem here on Earth first before even thinking about anything related to space". This seems like a pretty shallow code for space flight should not happen, ever.

I've been wondering about the people who make these comments for a while, and your seems to follow a similar blueprint. I have some questions, maybe you can answer them.

What motivates this? Are you worried about Earth getting deprioritized? Is the perception that we must decide between tackling social problems/climate change and gratuitous space adventures? Are these comments a way of saying that humans should never venture beyond Earth or that we're just not ready yet? Even if you believe actual humans should never go to space, do you still believe we should have infrastructure there to support Earth?

Razengan• 5 years ago

“Only do shit that immediately improves my own life.”

silent_cal5• 5 years ago

I didn't mean to make it code - space flight is a complete waste of money. As far as I'm concerned we've already proved our point with regard to space travel, and can now afford to spend those bajillions of dollars on planet earth instead of satisfying the curiosity of nerds.

ctdonath2• 5 years ago

The space stuff moves a lot of terrestrial stuff off-planet. Telecommunications has physical impact, much of it still wired and strung/buried across very long distances, or otherwise occupying space for lots of grounded towers. Sending that garbage (rhetorical or literal future) up solves your “worry about” for that industry. Yeah it matters.

SonicScrub10• 5 years ago

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

TheDudeMan• 5 years ago

Highly plausible analysis. Hopefully Woz is above the PR stunts and has a real plan for addressing the future problem (it's not really a problem yet, but it will be).

microtherion• 5 years ago

Woz the last 40 years has launched one PR stunt after the other (although, to be fair, I believe he has also done a fair amount of good things quietly in the background in the same time).

shantara3• 5 years ago

The most realistic solution for space junk deorbiting I've seen is the recently tested electromagnetic tether ("Terminator tape"). It is a passive solution that does not require an external spacecraft, and could be activated by a satellite operator when a satellite reaches the end of its lifespan. Perhaps, such system should be made mandatory, maybe even going as far as adding a dead man switch for its automatic activation in case the satellite becomes uncontrollable and stops responding to the commands from the Earth.

But even with this solution removing high orbit debris still remains a hard problem.

https://www.tethers.com/deorbit-systems/

https://spacenews.com/tethers-unlimited-terminator-tape-smal...

SonicScrub10• 5 years ago

This would work great for defunct satellites, but does nothing to solve the bigger space-junk danger: random bits and pieces of things from stage separations and previous collisions that are difficult to track. Definitely a step in the right direction, but it won't solve the largest threat.

everyone• 5 years ago

This is the most promising idea I've heard of...

https://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/niac...

bagels2• 5 years ago

There are on the order of... 10s of thousands of intentional satellites.

There are millions of pieces of debris.

It's useful for preventing future debris from dead satellites perhaps, but doesn't address the large number of existing objects which are currently the problem.

thatguy0900• 5 years ago

I remember a idea to use lasers to burn up space debris. Would you be able to just launch somd kind of weapons platform to handle space debris rather than trying to attach and slow them down?

rich_sasha2• 5 years ago

Unless you vapourise the debris, you just turned it into chunks of smaller debris, travelling at the same velocity.

dncornholio• 5 years ago

3) Every space agency funds the space dedebree-ing because they will be able to send up more to space again.

SonicScrub10• 5 years ago

My analysis assumed funding would occur. Pathways 1) and 2) are on the table regardless of the funding. Easy access to funding does not in anyway preclude options 1 and 2

lacksconfidence• 5 years ago

I'm no expert, but is that really a consideration for modern launches? I'm not aware of any space agency that is currently limited in what they can do by orbital debris. Maybe it changes the launch windows, or they adjust an orbit by a few km. But are missions actually being canceled such that they would fund someone to make those missions possible again?

iamnotwhoiam• 5 years ago

My understanding of the issue is that the biggest problems are a few well known defunct satellites in mid altitude orbit. We have no control over them so if two collide we are in big trouble. That almost happened last year. I think someone can make a big difference by targeting those first.

Ajedi323• 5 years ago

Maybe instead of de-orbiting debris they could collect it into a small number of well-known locations. Instead of 10k pieces of space junk to avoid in a particular orbit you could just have one or two. Might have less demanding delta-v requirements that way.

vsareto• 5 years ago

Higher orbit junk is what really matters, and will require much more delta-v to reach, and then again to de-orbit after "docking".

Wait, why? The lower orbit stuff traverses less space so it's easier to make it more dense and hazardous to space travel through that space.

jmcomets• 5 years ago

With my very basic understanding of orbital mechanics, higher orbits require more dV simply because it's further from Earth.

The more interesting bit is that subtle orbital adjustments require much less dV in higher orbits than in lower ones.

I like to think of it like pushing a barrel uphill: it takes more effort if the slope is steep, but then once it's up there, it's a lot easier to get the barrel moving downhill.

Anyways, the "de-orbit" cost follows the same rule of higher being more costly in dV, the big difference with an ascension being that the atmosphere slowing you down is what you want (aerobraking is the word, I think?). So the difference in dV between a high orbit and a low orbit descent isn't proportionate to that of the ascent, if that makes any sense.

Ajedi323• 5 years ago

Low orbit stuff gets naturally de-orbited after a few years/decades by stray air molecules from the Earth's atmosphere, so there's little point to manually cleaning it. Debris in higher orbits can take centuries or millennia to naturally de-orbit, so manual cleaning there makes more sense.

jcun4128• 5 years ago

What happened to the space broom/lasers idea. I guess could make things worse if the satellite "explodes".

whoisthemachine• 5 years ago

A couple of ideas that come with little knowledge, so take it with a big grain of salt:

1. "Electromagnetic Missile" with trajectory who's apogee is just below the targeted space junk. Turn on the electromagnet when just below the space junk to drag down its trajectory slightly, or even down to a de-orbit trajectory. Obviously, this only works with satellites built with magnetic materials. It may just be my outsider's perspective, but non-orbital missiles seem much easier and cheaper than rockets that go into orbital trajectories. Handling the return of the missile is tricky, perhaps it can also self-detonate fairly high in the atmosphere.

2. Ion engines or space sails driven tugs for use in getting to the space junk. My understanding is ion engines have a really favorable specific impulse. An optional chemical engine could be used to quickly de-orbit the tug upon reaching the satellite. Another idea to speed up de-orbit without requiring the tug the whole way would be a spring that would "push" the junk once it reached it, throwing it into an orbit that would more quickly drop it into the atmosphere. Newton could be used to our advantage to also push the tug into a new orbit to reach the next junk satellite sooner.

Obviously, arm-chair rocket scientist here, so feasibility of the above ideas can probably quickly be dis-proven.

danielheath• 5 years ago

Relevant bits of space junk are moving at tens of kilometers per second relative to the earths surface.

Both of those ideas involve getting (and staying) close to them for several seconds.

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

Can you use the junk's energy to power the cleaner? Imagine this: the cleaner has a big spring on the back of it. The spring is slowly compressed using solar power. The orbiter grabs a piece of junk, and then launches it backwards. The cleaner now has gained some of the energy from the junk, and the junk has lost energy.

perlgeek• 5 years ago

Going after bigger pieces in higher orbit might not bring much of an immediate benefit, but it can reduce the amount of damage if such an object is hit and shattered into many pieces (Kessler effect comes to mind).

So it might still be very worthwhile in the long term.

Beached• 5 years ago

not likely that they will have one craft that is used to deorbit multiple items. more likely there will be one craft with 100 micro/cub satellites in orbit. once junk identified, mother craft ejects micro sat, micro sat performs one single burn to rendevu with junk over a very long period of time. passively connects to it somehow, like magnets or or something, then once connected, then does a single. deorbit burn to change the trajectory of the junk to deorbit significantly faster than normal. sacrifice itself with the deorbit

arminiusreturns• 5 years ago

Maybe we can get the gov to use the reverse engineered alien antigrav tech we've had for decades to good use as a win for America and the world?

cletus2• 5 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

SonicScrub10• 5 years ago

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.

mcdonje• 5 years ago

An incentive appears to exist to wait for collisions every once in a while so that there's more junk at different levels to clean up, and to prove the need for cleaning up junk.

myself2483• 5 years ago

Except orbits are neither that precise nor that static, without active control.

Look up the "Gabbard diagram" of any orbital collision. Some of the debris ends up in rather elliptical orbits, with an apogee considerably higher than the orbit of either object that went into the collision. That means it presents a risk to satellites even in higher orbits.

Also, orbits decay. The atmosphere doesn't just stop at a line; there's thinner and thinner wisps of gas out there, ever so slightly dragging on orbiting objects. So higher orbits slowly get lower, and lower orbits rapidly get lower still, until the orbit turns into an entry trajectory.

The properties of the exosphere are fickle and change rapidly, influenced by the solar wind and other forces. So while it's certain that orbiting objects experience drag, it's very uncertain how _much_ drag.

An object in an elliptical orbit spends some of its time with a very low perigee and thus a lot of atmospheric drag and thus its orbit changes rapidly in ways that're hard to predict, even if its apogee is high enough that it also crosses orbits of interesting things that're trying to avoid it. And the less predictable it is, the harder it is to avoid.

mc32• 5 years ago

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?

MichaelMoser1232• 5 years ago

if you are moving with the almost the same speed and in the same direction as the debris, then there is a very small impact.

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

Maybe use lasers to ablate material on the debris, creating propulsion? Creates liability, though..

genericone2• 5 years ago

Maybe not hunting nets per say, maybe just a huge trawling net, or some sort of trawling-foam since we're in space. As high velocity objects begin to hit it, the foam will gain speed, but overtime, with presumably random speed-object collisions, the foam and its captured contents should have their speed reduced to 0 and fall. Doesn't need to be in foam or net form, but it does need to be a massive-entanglement-object, or MEO for short.

cletus2• 5 years ago

First, a lot of space debris is small. I'm talking like flecks of paint. That's an issue at high speed and this has hit the ISS [1].

Obviously there's the conservation of momentum to deal with. That fleck of paint has a decent amount of momentum but that's fairly easily absorbed by a couple of tons of material fixed to an otherwise rigid body.

You'd probably attach it via cables and if, somehow, enough momentum was delivered to that "paddle" that it would tear off the cables would just let it go.

If the paddle is fixed to the ring and is let go, it's just going to fall to Earth even with any added momentum, in which case it'll burn up in the atmosphere.

The more dangerous debris is larger stuff. Like there are dead parts of rockets, even smaller stuff like bolts. These pose extra challenges but a lot of the same principles apply.

[1] https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0513/Space-debris-dan....

jvanderbot• 5 years ago

There are small debris clouds, but also large uncontrolled spacecraft, like boosters. De-orbiting those could be a huge help, since a collision with a stray booster would create gobs of debris so those orbits may be completely avoided.

uoaei• 5 years ago

Things that are not rigid and that distribute the force throughout the body (think of slapping a big slab of silicone).

genericone2• 5 years ago

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.

quelltext3• 5 years ago

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.

Never heard this accent before.

walrus01• 5 years ago

as a native english speaker I would guess dutch, norwegian, swedish or icelandic

robgibbons• 5 years ago

It's an American accent, but with rhotacism, a type of speech impediment. He sounds vaguely British at times because of the tendency for "R" to come out sounding like "W"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Arthur

werdnapk• 5 years ago

American, but he has a speech impediment.

mLuby• 5 years ago

It's a speech impediment; he has trouble saying R's (and has improved as he's narrated more and more videos).

Isaac's earlier videos would show Elmer Fudd with the message "Having problems understanding me? Turn on CC." Example: https://youtu.be/gOu3zGfP-TQ?t=40

Source: I've watched lots of his videos and highly recommend them—mind expanding ideas!

me_me_me• 5 years ago

I was going to ask the same question, its so unusual but never heard it before

orbital-decay2• 5 years ago

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.

spankalee• 5 years ago

I think the thing you're salvaging is the orbital itself. That has value and the salvager should get a percentage of that. This requires international regulation we don't have though.

failuser• 5 years ago

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.

delecti• 5 years ago

Even if you assume there are sufficient working parts in orbit to construct working satellites, doing that reconstruction in space would require gathering them together in space either by people (super expensive) or by a sufficiently flexible robot, in which case we're already sending up something, just send up the desired new satellite instead.

Alternatively we could deorbit components without them burning up and assemble new ones down here, but that would also be vastly more expensive than just making new ones down here to begin with.

dcgudeman2• 5 years ago

Crazy idea: can new boats be assembled from the wrecks of old boats: the parts are already in the ocean, you can't reuse metal, but you could reuse masts, wood, and hulls, etc.

Ankaios• 5 years ago

Good question—DARPA has asked it, too: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/darpa-unveils-roboti...

izzydata• 5 years ago

I've seen this kind of things in many works of science fiction, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it even for non-space related salvage.

thornygreb• 5 years ago

Reminds me of Salvage 1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1), Andy Griffith goes to the moon in 1979!

A4ET8a8uTh0• 5 years ago

Thank you. I could not figure out the business proposition behind it from the release.

laumars2• 5 years ago

There was a Korean movie about a vaguely similar topic: salvaging space debris that I enjoyed

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12838766/

hosh• 5 years ago

That's a great movie!

There's also Japanese anime series set in the near-future sci-fi about a small company that cleans up space debris, called "Planet ES"

NL807• 5 years ago

There is also a manga and anime, called Planetes, which is about salvaging and removing debris:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

pvg• 5 years ago

And schlocky 70's American TV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1

deepdmistry• 5 years ago

Orbital tolls :)

mch82• 5 years ago

Key West fun fact, Florida’s first millionaire made his fortune as a wrecker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Curry

ddxxdd• 5 years ago

If the mechanism doesn't involve powerful neodynium magnets, then they will end up creating even more space debris.

areoform• 5 years ago

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.”

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.

orbital-decay2• 5 years ago

All good points.

The hard capture business is the national security business.

This one is what makes it particularly messy. Everything in space is somehow related to defense and natsec, even if it doesn't seem so to an outsider. Even with hypothetical agreements in place, touching defunct space assets is just a huge can of worms, even with a laser beam. And anything that can capture a satellite is an outright military tech.

Same goes for on-orbit refueling and servicing, although these are a bit easier since they typically deal with functioning satellites.

amelius• 5 years ago

This might also be of military-strategic interest: if you can clean up debris, you can probably also clean up enemy spacecraft.

vasco• 5 years ago

At some point I guess the world will have to regulate orbits similarly to how we regulate the electromagnetic spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_auction

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.

whatshisface• 5 years ago

We do regulate orbits. Up until now there have been no cleaner companies so we'll see how that plays in to regulation. "Who will pay for it?" is indeed an interesting question.

It is not too early because the mess produces more mess through collisions, meaning that the sooner you catch it the less expensive it is to fix. Waiting until the problem is directly painful is humanity's normal operating procedure, but it's also like waiting until your cancer is stage 4 before getting it looked at.

jjoonathan3• 5 years ago

From a strict physics perspective, I tend to think you are right, but from a messy human perspective I think orbital cleanup companies stand to do a lot of good even if they never retrieve more than a token satellite or two.

Being able to say "You just made a $200M mess," priced on the cost of cleanup, is a lot more powerful than just being able to say "You made a mess." A concrete price tag is a boon for regulation, for liability & enforcement, and even for space startups explaining to their investors why yes, they do have to include fuel budget for the viking funeral, and no, they can't just decide not to, because the alternative is a $200M cleanup fee.

SahAssar• 5 years ago

The big difference from EM is that if you turn of your transmitter the "junk" disappears while space junk can persist for a long time in any orbit that is not extremely close. It is also very unknown how much it will cost to clean up the junk and how spread out it will be (both because space-cleaning is new and that space accidents tend to spread out). It sounds great to have those requirements conceptually but it is also extremely hard to even start to think about what those requirements would be and how to enforce them globally.

PeterisP3• 5 years ago

Orbits don't work that way.

First, many satellites share an orbit - for example, the whole GEO is a single orbital path, and it has hundreds, something like 25% of all the world's satellites spread over that path; and any junk that intersects that orbit is a threat to all of them, not any one in particular.

Second, a random piece of space junk is likely to be in a weird orbit where no satellite would want to be, but that potentially crosses/intersects many orbits where we would like to put satellites or have already done so, so again, it threatens many satellites (or "orbital slots"), not any one in particular. An orbit that's "clean" for this rotation might intersect a piece of space junk in the next rotation or a month afterwards; that junk is not "in that orbit" but it's still a threat to that orbit and many others because its path is crossing these orbits.

You could assign responsibility to sources of particular pieces debris; but there simply aren't cleanly separable areas of space for orbits to which you could assign responsibility like we do for radio spectrum.

quxbar• 5 years ago

Great hard sci-fi manga series using this concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

slothtrop• 5 years ago

I remember this, pretty well done

jedgardyson• 5 years ago

As a note, the manga is a lot less "hard" but no less enjoyable than the anime. For the anime they had a bunch of space folks consult to fix things up so if the space faring details bother you watch that.

mlindner7• 5 years ago

Do you have a source for that? The manga I remember being quite accurate (though it's been a decade at least since I last read it). The anime diverges drastically story wise from the manga (the main characters are even different).

andjd• 5 years ago

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?

yunohn• 5 years ago

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.

halfmatthalfcat• 5 years ago

Because it ends up as just noise. If there’s no track record of execution, there’s little hope if any that this will be fruitful in any capacity.

mlindner7• 5 years ago

Someone who's serially unsuccessful is worse than someone who has no record.

ctdonath2• 5 years ago

Because Woz.

Even naysayers took time to read &/| post.

h2odragon4• 5 years ago

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.

ilamont• 5 years ago

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.

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...

newman8r• 5 years ago

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.

toast0• 5 years ago

With all due respect to Woz, having him headline your company is an admission of a scam. He's let his name get attached to so much garbage.

BitwiseFool• 5 years ago

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.

edm0nd• 5 years ago

His name will get headlines and PR no matter what he is doing. Just a fact in the tech biz for being who he is.

eplanit• 5 years ago

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.

wolverine8762• 5 years ago

You want entrepreneurs who don't fail? Then they aren't entrepreneurs.

LightG3• 5 years ago

Woz ... always cleaning up after belligerent billionaires.

masswerk2• 5 years ago

WoZ vs Star Link will be the epic story of the 21st century… ;-)

LightG3• 5 years ago

Star Woz? :-)

comeonseriously• 5 years ago

I am of mixed opinion on this. On the one hand, okay, there's a lot of debris that needs to be cleaned up. On the other, services like this can only encourage space companies to be sloppy.

toss12• 5 years ago

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.

Any astro engineers have any insights?

giantrobot2• 5 years ago

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.

Basically none of that is practical. Moving anything in space requires fuel. Changing a satellite's orbit from A to B requires the same amount of fuel as going from B to A. Going from A to B and then back to A takes twice the fuel. If you pick up more mass at B, you actually need more fuel to get back to A. You also need fuel to rendezvous with your fuel depot where you can get all the fuel for these trips.

Every rendezvous has a probability of failure. The more rendezvous you perform the more likely it is something bad will happen. Satellites aren't usually super sturdy structures because they're optimizing for mass. So some satellite herder needs to spend a lot of extra fuel matching the target's spin rate and velocity so capturing it doesn't cause it to break apart.

Then there's the orbital manufacturing. Even if you managed to capture hundreds of satellites and herd them into some holding orbit, you've got a bunch of heterogeneous parts clumped together. You'd need to disassemble a bunch of devices that weren't meant to be disassembled. Even if you get them disassembled they're a bunch of finished packaged parts. They're not going to be reusable so they'd need to be melted down. Now you need smelters and centrifuges and every other chain in recycling materials to base feedstocks.

That's all an absurd level of complexity and danger compared to just de-orbiting a satellite. The costs don't even compare. Your proposal would be phenomenally expensive if it was practical. Satellite clean up is highly impractical and expensive but still orders of magnitude more practical and cheaper than the things you're talking about.

toss12• 5 years ago

Thanks! I hadn't considered the risks of multiple rendevous maneuvers — probably more risky than shooting some kind of net around the target with a drag sail attached or something.

Like a magnified version of most modern mfg, it just bugs me that the easiest way to deal with failures is to just trash the thing rather than reuse/repair.

trymas• 5 years ago

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?

Something else?

stemlord• 5 years ago

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.

8ytecoder• 5 years ago

“Research” - they were testing their orbital targeting capabilities.

gowld2• 5 years ago

They do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit

colechristensen• 5 years ago

It depends on the orbit.

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.

modeless2• 5 years ago

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.

jimbob21• 5 years ago

Lowering orbit is not easier than raising orbit, it takes the same delta-v.

Why is this? From a layman's perspective it seems like gravity would be a massive form of help here and therefore lowering orbit should require much less fuel.

advisedwang• 5 years ago

The FCC _is_ working on making orbital cleanup mandatory: https://www.fcc.gov/document/mitigating-orbital-debris-new-s...

mlindner7• 5 years ago

Yes but the FCC is going the wrong direction with that. Firstly it treats constellations differently than individual satellites which makes no sense from a statistical and mathematical perspective and it would also completely kill off the smallest of satellites that students learn with that are primarily launched by universities.

mfer• 5 years ago

I hope he makes a trash compactor named Wall-E

AzzieElbab• 5 years ago

“Wheels of Zeus” (‘WoZ’) - I like it already

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

Where's the careers page? I want in!

inasio• 5 years ago

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!

[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.

streamofdigits• 5 years ago

Maybe he is just trolling the "private space flight pioneers"

EMM_386• 5 years ago

This is a good visualizer that shows the growing problem:

http://stuffin.space/

skohan• 5 years ago

It seems like a nice idea, but doesn't cleaning the ocean seem a bit more pressing?

anonymousiam• 5 years ago

Wonder why he visited AMOS, and in what capacity? It's a cool place to visit, but unless Woz has the appropriate clearances, he's not likely to get much out of his visit.

academia_hack2• 5 years ago

He's building an ASAT weapon. The debris story is just PR spin.

theshrike79• 5 years ago

There was a hard-scifi manga/anime about this almost 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

"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• 5 years ago

This series was great. Had me from the opening with the shuttle and screw.

b0afc375b5• 5 years ago

8.29 on MAL. Thanks for sharing!

jpalomaki• 5 years ago

Maybe we should have global tax or mandatory insurance on shooting stuff in phase. Proceedings would be used to cover cleanup costs for accidents.

Private companies would then compete on specific cleanup tasks.

quintaindilemma• 5 years ago

Meanwhile, in possibly related news from Cupertino, a local station reports that a BFI garbage truck inexplicably fell from orbit and has struck Apple headquarters, demolishing the area out to a radius of a square mile.

born-jre• 5 years ago

first clean up the plastic in sea :D

ape4• 5 years ago

Woz being the good guy again

sleepybrett• 5 years ago

https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes

Roritharr• 5 years ago

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.

quijoteuniv• 5 years ago

I really thought this was going to be some kind of a joke, that woz was going to clean the space from tourists/ tourists trash. But kudos anyway to woz (again) for thinking on improving rather than just profiting

mlindner7• 5 years ago

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.

wolverine8762• 5 years ago

Someone with only a distant view of the space industry said to me, 'I don't understand they excitement over the new private launch companies (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, etc.). They are doing things that were accomplished 50 years ago; they are just money-making ventures, not exploration.' I think it's a good point to think about (try to restrain yourself, as I do, from picking at their point-of-view).

They will be happy to hear about Woz's project; Woz is doing something useful with the opportunity for commercial space.

noahtallen• 5 years ago

I mean, definitely true on the level of making money (like every business), but SpaceX is doing things that haven’t been done before. (Landing and reusing rockets.) Related to that, making space more accessible is important for anything else space-related to happen. As an example, say Woz needs to send up robots to perform cleanup ops: that that of thing is probably only viable with accessible space launches. I’m not saying that robots will be used, just that sending X product or venture into space requires space launches to be accessible to more companies. And that’s possible because of these private launch companies innovating in the space.

cpeterso• 5 years ago

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”

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.*

samirillian2• 5 years ago

Wozniak finding an excuse to have a private space company is somehow the most...pathetic of all the rich guys compensating with space companies. A cigar may sometimes just be a cigar, but a rocket is never just a rocket with these people.

awillen• 5 years ago

Finding an excuse? He doesn't need an excuse. He's got the money/ability to raise the funds to do it.

He's choosing to do it for a reason that's going to be generally beneficial, if it works, at least. That's pathetic?

I'm just generally baffled by people criticizing these billionaires - the ones who are putting their money into making America a clear leader in what is going to be an increasingly strategic industry, while creating thousands upon thousands of high-quality, high-paying jobs. You know there's a bunch of billionaires who just spend they money on art that they then store in vaults, while they vacation on yachts, right? Why not criticize them instead of the guy spending his money trying to clean up space, a shared resource for our species?

samirillian2• 5 years ago

profitable? well, at least they have a theoretical path, unlike uber: further resource exploitation cuz we're really running out here, and we can't just let our art gather dust in vaults! Anyway, I haven't worked out the numbers yet, but I am curious to see how capitalism overcomes the laws of thermodynamics here. like, have you ever tried to get a package from chicago to vancouver? so yeah all we need a a giant fucking rocket, and Amazon's amazing supply-chain logistics and..dang, who knows, it might work. And Bezos' weak chin is incidental.

recursivequine• 5 years ago

That webpage is cancer. I'm not searching for the article amidst a myriad of ads

Steve Wozniak announces private space company to clean up space debris in orbit

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