Seeds for a new debris-removal industry

The Defense Department doles out study contracts in the six-to-seven figure range so often they are rarely worth mentioning in the grand scheme of needle movers, but the Space Development Agency’s Commercial Disposal Services awards are different.

On September 26, the agency split $1.9 million in study contracts across six U.S. companies – Arkisys, Impulse Space, Quantum Space, Sierra Space, SpaceWorks Enterprises, and Starfish Space – to evaluate on-demand “de-orbit as a service” for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) constellation.

Megaconstellations have long been thought of as ideal customers for debris-removal services on account of their large numbers of spacecraft, the high value of their orbits, and the likelihood of spacecraft failures that could compromise those orbits. But the largest of these constellations – Starlink – has been extremely proactive in taking steps that avoid requiring such services. Its satellites are deployed around 250 kilometers above sea level, meaning premature failures are quickly swept up by Earth’s atmosphere. Starlink doesn’t always operate satellites through their full design life, instead piloting them downward for destructive reentries while the company still has them under control. And should a Starlink satellite die in service, its operational orbit of 550 kilometers is low enough that gravity and residual atmospheric drag will pull the satellite down within four years.

The PWSA constellation, in contrast, operates at 1,000 kilometers. Satellites that fail at that higher altitude will remain stuck for millennia. For SDA, having a debris-removal service isn’t really optional. Effective space stewardship requires a means to preserve the PWSA orbit, especially in the case of contingencies like unexpected satellite failures.

SDA’s effort to cultivate American debris removal companies could also benefit other constellations. Another 200 kilometers above PWSA is where Eutelsat operates the 600-plus-satellite OneWeb constellation (1,200km orbit), and a farther 100km is where Telesat plans to fly 200 Lightspeed broadband satellites (1,300km orbit).

The SDA effort could also cultivate competitors for international debris-removal companies. While SDA, in its justification for the study contracts, said “no such product or service yet exists” to support commercial on-orbit servicing, like “assisted disposal operations,” startups Astroscale of Japan, ClearSpace of Switzerland, and D-Orbit of Italy have been maturing technologies for this very purpose.

SOURCE: https://www.sda.mil/sda-makes-commercial-disposal-services-study-awards-under-stec-baa/