Dooner and The Dude learn how keeping orbital space clean is a growing business
What goes up must come down, or so they say; but what happens to the stuff that gets sent into space, orbits the Earth and never comes back?
Dave Fischer, vice president of business development and advanced systems for Astroscale, tells Dooner and The Dude how he is working to give space a clean sweep.
“In the next 10 years you could see tens of thousands of new satellites,” says Fischer, with low-orbit space getting more and more crowded.
Astroscale is focused on removing large debris from the orbital channel, basically getting rid of all the junk.
It will remove things like old satellites, discarded stages of rockets and other large items that could cause collisions and damage to operational devices in orbit.
Fischer says there are two types of satellites: those prepared for eventual removal and those not prepared.
Prepared satellites are built with docking stations or grappling hooks that make retrieval and removal easier, and Fischer hopes companies will start standardizing these features on anything they launch into space.
Astroscale is also looking at performing fleet management on geostationary satellites that have finished out their intended life cycle but are still operational.