The startup looking to clean up space junk

This article is from an episode on Disrupting Japan. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full episode, go here.

Nobu Okada is the founder of Astroscale, a startup aiming to solve the problem of space debris.

Different entities are putting more and more satellites into orbit every year. Some of those end up becoming zombie satellites, while others collide and become space debris, zipping around at thousands of miles per hour.

The Astroscale team / Photo credit: Astroscale

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Okada and his team want to do something about this by de-orbiting the scrap metal. And since its launch in 2013, Astroscale has been gaining international recognition.

Can you walk us through the problem?

There are a variety of debris sizes in space. If we count those that are larger than 10 centimeters, there are more than 23,000 pieces. And the bigger ones are between 8 meters to 10 meters – that’s like a double-decker bus.

Smaller ones would be around 1mm or less, so it is a wide range.

These pieces typically fly around at 7 kilometers per second to 8 kilometers per second – 40 times faster than a bullet – making them powerful enough to blow up other objects in space.

The density of such debris has reached a certain threshold where there’s now a chain reaction of collisions. So there’s a consensus currently in the space industry that we should remove larger objects now before they get smaller and harder to retrieve.

You founded Astroscale without a background in aerospace. What attracted you to this problem?

When I was 15 years old, I went to NASA in the US. There was a space camp program where they trained us to become junior astronauts.

It was fun, and I met real astronauts and NASA engineers, which ignited my passion. But what I found out was that there was no actual astronaut’s job. NASA usually takes people with a particular specialty and then trains them to become an astronaut.

So, I had to major and specialize somewhere else.

I went and worked for the Japanese minister of finance and then moved on to a consulting firm. I even ran two IT companies at one point. And when I turned 40, I had a midlife crisis. I remembered my days at NASA and realized that space was an industry I really wanted to work in.

I attended a couple of space conferences to see what were the hot topics and found that space debris was a growing threat. So I got the CDs from the conference, printed out all of the papers, and read them. That was about 700 papers.

I got stuck on the jargon at first, but eventually I learned them and came up with a hypothesis to solve the issue.

How exactly does Astroscale work?

When you go up to space, there are a lot of lights coming from the moon, the earth, the sun, stars, even garbage. So we had to create a chaser satellite that could identify our target and then approach the debris, which is again flying around in different directions at about 8 km per second.

To catch it, we have to make sure the relative speed of our satellite would become zero. Once we successfully approach a piece, we have to now think about how we’re going to capture it as it is usually tumbling and rotating.

There are many ideas about this, but what we do is we synchronize the motion of our chaser satellite with the debris. It was something we had to spend a lot of time on to develop.

The capture mechanism also depends on the target’s characteristics, but what we are developing right now is magnet-based mechanism.

Once debris is captured, we have to stabilize the motion of our chaser, bring the piece down to the atmosphere, and burn it.

How do you build a business model around this? Who pays for this cleanup?

Most of the debris comes from “constellations,” which are a bunch of satellites that companies launch together.

Once launched, a satellite can take a picture of Tokyo twice a day, for example – that’s a typical satellite mission. But going forward, companies will launch satellites as a flock to make sure they can provide coverage over the world.

But these satellites often go defunct because of various reasons like radiation or a malfunction in solar power. When this happens, companies have to replace them with new ones to keep the coverage consistent.

So the companies need to replace the satellites in the same spot, and they can’t do that until the broken one is out of orbit?

Right, and that’s our job. So we are talking with constellation players very actively because they need us.
nIt’s like AAA in the US. In the highway, if there’s a broken car, they go and deal with it. If there is a broken satellite, we have to do a similar job like AAA.

But we’re not only dealing with constellations. A lot of the debris was put there by governments – because space development projects are usually done by governments. We’ve been actively talking to these entities around the world. And until a year ago, they were just in listening mode. But quite recently, they now understand how critical this is.

Part of it is the practicality of our idea and another driver is the cost.

There were various papers saying that the cost to remove one large object was somewhere between US$200 million to US$500 million. If we multiply that with the number of critical objects, that’s a gigantic sum of money. That’s why governments could not move forward. However, we’re thinking of a radically competitive price.

What is the biggest technological challenge for Astroscale moving forward?

The risk is more on the organization right now: to meet the demand, we have to increase our capability, continue hiring the right people, and have great teamwork. Our culture is really good. People gather for a purpose, and it’s quite a simple and clear mission. That’s great, but we have to continue.