Wow that website looks very nice. We built ours using cesium but it has a lot of bloat that we don't need. This looks much cleaner and faster. We'll connect with you on LinkedIn.
We have looked into drag and solar sails, EM tethers, as well as installing modules to provide retrograde propulsion. We agree though, the best approach right now is just docking and moving at the moment.
Yeah we've actually talked about this with Inversion Space. We would be very interested in bringing vanguard back to earth but there needs to be a re-entry vessel available to put it in.
We've looked into both, in GEO it would be just moving to graveyard orbit, In LEO there are large objects in the 1100 km range that we'd like to bring down to ~400km before going back up.
There are a few ideas like this floating around and this may be a viable solution for small objects in the future. You might have countries calling you up asking about space warfare concerns though.
We plan to leverage some of the technology on-board the Restore-L via technology license agreements with NASA. There are a lot of potential solutions and different approaches and we hope to be one of them. The space requires a decent number of these satellites in-space and NASA's not in the market of producing and operating large fleets of satellites. To answer your question, It's too early to say what the ultimate advantages or disadvantages will be from different players.
Hello! We would love to chat with you offline, you can message us your contact information through our website with your email or email us at [email protected].
I'll try to answer these:
-Fragmentation I'm assuming you are referring to the debris clouds of small objects after a conjunction. This is a very hard problem. We are starting with removal of large-uncontrolled objects before they collide. The solution to removing those small pieces of debris might be something very different such as insertion of clouds of inert gas or giant balloon type sweeps.
-Initial design is based on orbit modification of operational satellites then moving to defunct satellites or spent upper stages. Salvaged material could hopefully be entire satellites in the future. We have some friends at Inversion space working on re-entry vessels. The possibility of space-based recycling centers is also exciting.
-We have talked with Space Force, US department of Space Commerce, NASA, consultants. One of our advisors on the team is Kevin O'Connell to help with this. We also joined the group started by DARPA called CONFERS to work with others in the industry to develop standards.
-The timeline has been fairly well modeled by aerospace corp using monte-carlo simulations. You can find an old version of this in the "Catcher's Mitt" report. The models will drastically under-predict the problem if more conjunctions occur like the Iridium incident, however so it's really hard to say. The short answer is that ~10 high-risk objects need to be removed per year to stabilize the issue.
Good points we have been thinking about ourselves for a long time. The business model for orbital debris removal doesn't really exist at this point. We are starting with a solution that can provide satellite services and using that to create a foundation for a economic removal of large space-debris objects. Once the solution is available with data demonstrating costs - government bodies will likely come on board.
Good point. It's a lot like international waters at this point but there is a very interesting aspect regarding this. Currently the FCC is the primary governing body in the space realm and requires all international satellites to abide by their rules in order to access the US telecommunications market. This translated to ~90% of all satellites following their rules due to monetary incentives.