The Hidden Risk of Space Junk (and its Opportunity)

This is an article I wrote when I first began writing in 2018. I'm posting it now on the site to see how it has held up.

The modern space race presents highly lucrative trends for a savvy investor willing to take the risk in commercializing space. In a recent analysis by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the space industry is expected to explode in growth from $350 billion today to $3 trillion by 2030. They cite the plummeting cost of space access fueled by technology from companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab. This points to incredibly bullish momentum for the industry, with multiple tailwinds including growing international space investment and more than $16 billion invested in space startups over the last two decades.

However, none of that will matter if space is made impassable by the ever-growing cloud of space debris surrounding Earth. Left unchecked, the cloud will grow until placing assets into space becomes prohibitively expensive and shareholder value in space-related operations is destroyed. The problem originated due to the lack of procedures for properly disposing of used equipment such as rocket boosters and defunct satellites. They were left drifting in orbit and when they end up colliding, more debris is generated in the explosion, further increasing the future chance of collision. The resulting smaller fragments become devastating projectiles at these high orbital speeds of up to 17,500 mph.

The usual method of preventing damage to existing assets involves tracking objects from the ground and initiating avoidance maneuvers when the risk of collision crosses a threshold. Alternatively, an operator can let the collision occur and install thicker shields on future equipment to hopefully prevent damage. Both options have grown in cost as tracking has become more complex to account for increased debris populations, fuel is spent on avoidance, and more sophisticated shielding needs to be installed. Despite attempts to track debris, debris smaller than .4 inches is difficult to track and can easily cause catastrophic damage upon impact.

The industry has been slow to react but has begun waking up to the dangers of unchecked junk. They have put in place mitigation procedures, which detail the proper disposal of assets once the end-of-life period has been reached. Satellites are required to either move to graveyard orbits, which are unused orbits, or to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. However, only 60% of missions follow this protocol and estimates from NASA note that even if mitigation was followed by all involved parties, the debris would continue to steadily grow due to collisions of existing debris.

The solution is to take a direct approach: active debris removal. It removes debris from orbit and would tackle the problem at its heart. The problem is that it is held back by nascent technology hampered by a lack of funding or interest from responsible parties. The technology itself is untested, and challenges remain on how to best target high-priority objects, such as large boosters or non-operational satellites. Concepts such as ground-based lasers, mechanical grapplers with nets, and advanced electric propulsion have all been proposed, but previously none had driven costs down far enough to the point where operators would deploy them. The costs of not doing so are steep, as it will only become more difficult to implement these methods once the orbits hit a critical point of junk concentration. There are estimates that this will likely happen within decades.

Luckily, startups such as Astroscale, who are dedicated to spaceflight safety, have stepped up to tackle this problem. Since 2015, Astroscale has raised more than $50 million to fund mitigation and removal concepts that they believe companies may finally be willing to pay for. They plan on offering companies the option to affix a small component to their assets before launch for a small fee. That piece will then be used as an attachment point by a retriever satellite in the case that the craft fails to be disposed of properly. It seems that their business plan hinges on private companies recognizing the need to take responsibility for their assets and government regulation, which would force companies to clean up after themselves. This would also include government assistance that could help turn profits.

Astroscale is joined by companies like D-Orbit and Launchspace Technologies, hinting at the increasing need for this emerging industry.

Already, space debris cleanup is showing itself to be essential to the business models of other space startups which have implemented plans that will further congest the orbits. These startups plan to launch the so-called “mega-constellations” containing hundreds of satellites in the span of a few years that will need to be cleaned up. These companies, such as Swarm Technologies, will deploy in low Earth orbit, which currently has around a thousand satellites. Their volume of communications satellites would end up far outstripping the existing population. For their product to succeed, they will have to rely on the orbits staying clear, as the debris cascading process will inevitably cause enormous financial damage with increasing regularity relative to the debris growth.

The failure of existing space assets turning into debris is a very real problem. Just last year in 2017, four satellites failed in orbit. The cause of these failures stemmed from satellites that had exceeded their design life, which were all at least 14 years old. The companies operating these satellites chose not to retire them to keep customers happy by minimizing additional costs that would have been passed on to consumers, but these costs exist regardless, in the form of future spending needed to retrieve and remove these satellites from operational orbits. This attitude is proving to be increasingly short-sighted and will provide a tailwind to boost companies like Astroscale into profitability.

There are enormous investing opportunities afforded by space, as it is expected to swell tenfold in the next few decades. At the same time, there are challenges in the form of space debris, historically ignored, that have been building up for the last few decades. For new technology to flourish and existing services to provide the same level of quality, no doubt government regulation will eventually be needed to keep the orbits publicly available. In the meantime, private sectors will have to step up to fulfill the role that lumbering government regulation has not been able to realize. A lucrative opportunity is sure to lie in wait for the company that can figure out how to successfully commercialize cleaning up space junk. It is needed to keep the gates open for the final frontier.