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

804 points by notRobot 5y ago

Tajnymag 5y ago
Yes, please
danpalmer 5y 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.
wongarsu 5y ago
https://archive.is/9YLSb https://archive.is/9YLSb
wongarsu 5y 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 5y ago
  They might be betting on some upcoming regulation.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  They should lobby for a law requiring companies to deorbit satellites after EOL.
  - SonicScrub 5y 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.
    - ttymck 5y ago
      If you require the company to perform a service, one that they may not want to perform or be very good at, it's possible they will subcontract the work.
    - mnd999 5y ago
      I’m guessing they be planning on offering their services to carry out said de-orbit. Lobbying for regulation mandating a service you provide is a pretty tried and tested business model. Every company IT audit I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating in works the same way.
      - SonicScrub 5y ago
        The most efficient way to de-orbit the satellite is to design it with de-orbit capability built in. Satellites already have maneuvering thrusters with propellant and/or "kicker" stages to maneuver them in their destination orbit. De-orbiting capability is just some extra delta-v onboard, and a de-orbit maneuver coded into the flight computer. "Space-tug" like services from a third-party would be vastly more expensive. The only use case would to de-orbit a satellite that for some reason failed to de-orbit itself.
        giantrobot 5y ago
        > De-orbiting capability is just some extra delta-v onboard, and a de-orbit maneuver coded into the flight computer. It's not "just" some delta-v, it's the same amount of delta-v as the original perigee kick. Most satellites get their perigee kick from a booster stage from their launch vehicle that separates from the satellite and de-orbits. Every gram of mass of fuel and engine on a satellite is a gram less of payload.
        SonicScrub 5y ago
        Yes, and it is still vastly more efficient to bring that delta-v with you than to use an entire other vehicle to come up to you provided by a third-party to de-orbit for you. Which is the case I was comparing and contrasting with in response to the parent comment. Evidently this is the case knowing that de-orbiting capabilities are built-in to many low-earth orbit satellites, although it (and any de-orbiting method) is prohibitively expensive for higher orbits
  - C19is20 5y ago
    Under what/ which/ whos jurisdiction?
- loonster 5y ago
  Maybe they will also become an insurance company to insure satellites from spatial debris.
- eatmyshorts 5y 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.
  - JBorrow 5y ago
    Pretty sure that SpaceX is enough of an environmental disaster already that they won't care.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      What do you mean?
      - tecleandor 5y ago
        Probably one of these themes: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-risky-rush-for-mega-constellations/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-risky-rush-fo... https://qz.com/1971751/a-flood-of-spacex-satellites-started-a-fight-over-space-pollution/ https://qz.com/1971751/a-flood-of-spacex-satellites-started-...
    - cobrabyte 5y ago
      How so?
    - mlindner 5y ago
      If you don't know anything, don't open your mouth to make it clear to everyone.
      - JBorrow 5y ago
        I have a PhD in astronomy :) SpaceX is an environmental disaster that I guarantee we will look back on in 50 years as the company that kick-started kessler syndrome. They have already, objectively, caused huge environmental light-pollution based damage.
  - 5y ago
- academia_hack 5y 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.
shantara 5y 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 5y ago
  Presumably, government contracting. Your satellite crashes? Pay us to clean it up.
  - piker 5y ago
    or don't, and leave it there?
    - mirekrusin 5y ago
      You'll be sued for domino effect that crashed everything? But seriously, I have no idea how cleaning operations will look like. There are tens of thousands small piecies flying around at high speed. Every time I think about it my brain gives back cartoon scenes only as solution to cleanups.
  - shantara 5y 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?
    - libertine 5y ago
      Because accidents will start to become more common, and the more stuff we keep putting up there, more often they will occur.
  - panzagl 5y ago
    Given that the largest source of man-made debris is Chinese, I don't see that happening.
silent_cal 5y 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 5y 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.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y 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.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      The problem is the statistics. _Your_ launch will be very unlikely to be hit by debris, but _one of_ the 86400 manned spaceflights per day will be hit. And now you've lost not only the 200 souls onboard but also a portion of the city that the suborbital spacecraft was on a trajectory towards as the punctured hull falls short of the landing pad.
      - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
        If we were able to economically produce and sustain 86400 manned spaceflights per day cleaning space junk wouldn't be an issue. The problem is the viability of technology we actually rely on nowadays: global positioning, weather prediction, surveillance and satellite communication. Space exploration is pretty low on the list of reasons people should worry about debris in orbit.
SonicScrub 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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).
- shantara 5y ago
cletus 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E
- SonicScrub 5y 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 5y 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.
    - SonicScrub 5y ago
ddxxdd 5y ago
If the mechanism doesn't involve powerful neodynium magnets, then they will end up creating even more space debris.
areoform 5y 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 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-cataloged-debris-population-in-low-Earth-orbits-before-and-after-main_fig1_260503240 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/ 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.
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amelius 5y ago
This might also be of military-strategic interest: if you can clean up debris, you can probably also clean up enemy spacecraft.
vasco 5y 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 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 5y 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.
- jjoonathan 5y 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 5y 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.
juanani 5y ago
Well thank the heavens that some billionaire found a way to grow their pockets by cleaning up the other billionairs' trash. What could we have ever done without them?
quxbar 5y ago
Great hard sci-fi manga series using this concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
- slothtrop 5y ago
  I remember this, pretty well done
- jedgardyson 5y 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.
  - mlindner 5y 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).
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The_rationalist 5y ago
Has anyone quantified how serious, if serious this issue is?
andjd 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
    - femiagbabiaka 5y ago
      Does execution really matter? Elon Musk exists.
      - mlindner 5y ago
        ??? Execution on vision is the thing Elon Musk is most well known for, possibly more than anyone else in our current era.
        femiagbabiaka 5y ago
        This is the complete opposite of the truth on almost every front. Elon is really good at bluster and branding. The execution is never there at launch of one of his ventures and usually only halfway there years later, this applies to X.com, SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX, all of which were and in some cases still are failures even until this day. But surviving for long enough and with the right folks around you means that you can turn things around.
LightG 5y ago
Woz ... always cleaning up after belligerent billionaires.
- masswerk 5y ago
  WoZ vs Star Link will be the epic story of the 21st century… ;-)
  - LightG 5y ago
    Star Woz? :-)
    - masswerk 5y ago
      Don't miss Episode IV, where the Privateers do the AMOS Run in just one parsec and destroy the War Link in the grand finale – epic!
      - LightG 5y ago
        Has potential!
comeonseriously 5y 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.
toss1 5y 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?
- giantrobot 5y 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.
trymas 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
    “Research” - they were testing their orbital targeting capabilities.
- gowld 5y ago
  They do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit
- colechristensen 5y 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.
- modeless 5y ago
mfer 5y ago
I hope he makes a trash compactor named Wall-E
AzzieElbab 5y ago
“Wheels of Zeus” (‘WoZ’) - I like it already
qutreM 5y ago
I wonder how much those space debris are worth from a recycling standpoint.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Where's the careers page? I want in!
inasio 5y 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 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 5y ago
Maybe he is just trolling the "private space flight pioneers"
EMM_386 5y ago
This is a good visualizer that shows the growing problem: http://stuffin.space/ http://stuffin.space/
skohan 5y ago
It seems like a nice idea, but doesn't cleaning the ocean seem a bit more pressing?
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
Just read a manga with this topic. but who will pay for the removal? Governments? Not in the interest of private companies to clean up debris. I guess if they all pay, then it's a go.
anonymousiam 5y 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_hack 5y ago
  He's building an ASAT weapon. The debris story is just PR spin.
theshrike79 5y ago
There was a hard-scifi manga/anime about this almost 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes 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 5y ago
  This series was great. Had me from the opening with the shuttle and screw.
- b0afc375b5 5y ago
  8.29 on MAL. Thanks for sharing!
jpalomaki 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
first clean up the plastic in sea :D
ape4 5y ago
Woz being the good guy again
sleepybrett 5y ago
https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes
Roritharr 5y 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 5y 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
mlindner 5y 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.
wolverine876 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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/Desktop-Metal-Qualifies-Titanium-for-Manufacturing-with-the-Studio-System-2 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.*
samirillian 5y 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 5y 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?
  - samirillian 5y 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 5y ago
That webpage is cancer. I'm not searching for the article amidst a myriad of ads

804 points by notRobot 5y ago

Yes, please

"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.

wongarsu 5y ago

https://archive.is/9YLSb https://archive.is/9YLSb

wongarsu 5y 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 5y ago
They might be betting on some upcoming regulation.
aero-glide2 5y ago
They should lobby for a law requiring companies to deorbit satellites after EOL.
- SonicScrub 5y 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.
  - ttymck 5y ago
    If you require the company to perform a service, one that they may not want to perform or be very good at, it's possible they will subcontract the work.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    I’m guessing they be planning on offering their services to carry out said de-orbit. Lobbying for regulation mandating a service you provide is a pretty tried and tested business model. Every company IT audit I’ve ever had the pleasure of participating in works the same way.
    - SonicScrub 5y ago
      The most efficient way to de-orbit the satellite is to design it with de-orbit capability built in. Satellites already have maneuvering thrusters with propellant and/or "kicker" stages to maneuver them in their destination orbit. De-orbiting capability is just some extra delta-v onboard, and a de-orbit maneuver coded into the flight computer. "Space-tug" like services from a third-party would be vastly more expensive. The only use case would to de-orbit a satellite that for some reason failed to de-orbit itself.
      - giantrobot 5y ago
        > De-orbiting capability is just some extra delta-v onboard, and a de-orbit maneuver coded into the flight computer. It's not "just" some delta-v, it's the same amount of delta-v as the original perigee kick. Most satellites get their perigee kick from a booster stage from their launch vehicle that separates from the satellite and de-orbits. Every gram of mass of fuel and engine on a satellite is a gram less of payload.
        SonicScrub 5y ago
        Yes, and it is still vastly more efficient to bring that delta-v with you than to use an entire other vehicle to come up to you provided by a third-party to de-orbit for you. Which is the case I was comparing and contrasting with in response to the parent comment. Evidently this is the case knowing that de-orbiting capabilities are built-in to many low-earth orbit satellites, although it (and any de-orbiting method) is prohibitively expensive for higher orbits
- C19is20 5y ago
  Under what/ which/ whos jurisdiction?
loonster 5y ago
Maybe they will also become an insurance company to insure satellites from spatial debris.
eatmyshorts 5y 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.
- JBorrow 5y ago
  Pretty sure that SpaceX is enough of an environmental disaster already that they won't care.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    What do you mean?
    - tecleandor 5y ago
      Probably one of these themes: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-risky-rush-for-mega-constellations/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-risky-rush-fo... https://qz.com/1971751/a-flood-of-spacex-satellites-started-a-fight-over-space-pollution/ https://qz.com/1971751/a-flood-of-spacex-satellites-started-...
  - cobrabyte 5y ago
    How so?
  - mlindner 5y ago
    If you don't know anything, don't open your mouth to make it clear to everyone.
    - JBorrow 5y ago
      I have a PhD in astronomy :) SpaceX is an environmental disaster that I guarantee we will look back on in 50 years as the company that kick-started kessler syndrome. They have already, objectively, caused huge environmental light-pollution based damage.
- 5y ago
academia_hack 5y 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.

shantara 5y 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 5y ago
Presumably, government contracting. Your satellite crashes? Pay us to clean it up.
- piker 5y ago
  or don't, and leave it there?
  - mirekrusin 5y ago
    You'll be sued for domino effect that crashed everything? But seriously, I have no idea how cleaning operations will look like. There are tens of thousands small piecies flying around at high speed. Every time I think about it my brain gives back cartoon scenes only as solution to cleanups.
- shantara 5y 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?
  - libertine 5y ago
    Because accidents will start to become more common, and the more stuff we keep putting up there, more often they will occur.
- panzagl 5y ago
  Given that the largest source of man-made debris is Chinese, I don't see that happening.

silent_cal 5y 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 5y 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.
- WastingMyTime89 5y 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.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    The problem is the statistics. _Your_ launch will be very unlikely to be hit by debris, but _one of_ the 86400 manned spaceflights per day will be hit. And now you've lost not only the 200 souls onboard but also a portion of the city that the suborbital spacecraft was on a trajectory towards as the punctured hull falls short of the landing pad.
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      If we were able to economically produce and sustain 86400 manned spaceflights per day cleaning space junk wouldn't be an issue. The problem is the viability of technology we actually rely on nowadays: global positioning, weather prediction, surveillance and satellite communication. Space exploration is pretty low on the list of reasons people should worry about debris in orbit.

SonicScrub 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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).
shantara 5y ago

cletus 5y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E

SonicScrub 5y 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 5y 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.
  - SonicScrub 5y ago

ddxxdd 5y ago

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

areoform 5y 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 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-cataloged-debris-population-in-low-Earth-orbits-before-and-after-main_fig1_260503240 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/ 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

amelius 5y ago

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

vasco 5y 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 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 5y 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.
jjoonathan 5y 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 5y 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.

juanani 5y ago

Well thank the heavens that some billionaire found a way to grow their pockets by cleaning up the other billionairs' trash. What could we have ever done without them?

quxbar 5y ago

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

slothtrop 5y ago
I remember this, pretty well done
jedgardyson 5y 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.
- mlindner 5y 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).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

The_rationalist 5y ago

Has anyone quantified how serious, if serious this issue is?

andjd 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
  - femiagbabiaka 5y ago
    Does execution really matter? Elon Musk exists.
    - mlindner 5y ago
      ??? Execution on vision is the thing Elon Musk is most well known for, possibly more than anyone else in our current era.
      - femiagbabiaka 5y ago
        This is the complete opposite of the truth on almost every front. Elon is really good at bluster and branding. The execution is never there at launch of one of his ventures and usually only halfway there years later, this applies to X.com, SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX, all of which were and in some cases still are failures even until this day. But surviving for long enough and with the right folks around you means that you can turn things around.

LightG 5y ago

Woz ... always cleaning up after belligerent billionaires.

masswerk 5y ago
WoZ vs Star Link will be the epic story of the 21st century… ;-)
- LightG 5y ago
  Star Woz? :-)
  - masswerk 5y ago
    Don't miss Episode IV, where the Privateers do the AMOS Run in just one parsec and destroy the War Link in the grand finale – epic!
    - LightG 5y ago
      Has potential!

comeonseriously 5y 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.

toss1 5y 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?

giantrobot 5y 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.

trymas 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  “Research” - they were testing their orbital targeting capabilities.
gowld 5y ago
They do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit
colechristensen 5y 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.
modeless 5y ago

mfer 5y ago

I hope he makes a trash compactor named Wall-E

AzzieElbab 5y ago

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

qutreM 5y ago

I wonder how much those space debris are worth from a recycling standpoint.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Where's the careers page? I want in!

inasio 5y 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 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 5y ago

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

EMM_386 5y ago

This is a good visualizer that shows the growing problem: http://stuffin.space/ http://stuffin.space/

skohan 5y ago

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

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

Just read a manga with this topic. but who will pay for the removal? Governments? Not in the interest of private companies to clean up debris. I guess if they all pay, then it's a go.

anonymousiam 5y 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_hack 5y ago
He's building an ASAT weapon. The debris story is just PR spin.

theshrike79 5y ago

There was a hard-scifi manga/anime about this almost 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes 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 5y ago
This series was great. Had me from the opening with the shuttle and screw.
b0afc375b5 5y ago
8.29 on MAL. Thanks for sharing!

jpalomaki 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

first clean up the plastic in sea :D

ape4 5y ago

Woz being the good guy again

sleepybrett 5y ago

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

Roritharr 5y 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 5y 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

mlindner 5y 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.

wolverine876 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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/Desktop-Metal-Qualifies-Titanium-for-Manufacturing-with-the-Studio-System-2 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.*

samirillian 5y 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 5y 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?
- samirillian 5y 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 5y ago

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