How cleaning up space debris could grow to become a big business

Thousands of satellites are circling the Earth, and when they die, they don’t just disappear. Neither do the rockets that put them there.

This week, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the moon, more than a year after it was left on an uncontrolled trajectory following a lunar mission.

Closer to Earth, defunct satellites, spent rocket parts and other debris can remain in orbit for years, adding to an increasingly congested environment and an elevated risk of collisions.

Now, a growing group of companies is betting that cleaning up this orbital junk, and servicing satellites before they become it, could become a business in its own right.

Space infrastructure has become foundational for the global economy, crucial in everything from financial transactions and GPS navigation to weather forecasting and missile tracking. 

“Space is a global commons, and we’re mucking it up,” Andrew Faiola, commercial vice president at Tokyo-listed orbital services firm Astroscale, told CNBC. “We do need to clean it up. There are consequences to just sort of having a throwaway culture in space.”

An exponential problem

An interactive map developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin shows the congestion in real time in low-Earth orbit, where satellites operate alongside debris from decades of space activity, including U.S. and former Soviet rockets and satellites.

Meanwhile, OrbitRadar tracks nearly 30,000 objects in space, of which about 18,500 are active satellites, and the rest are debris fragments or spent rocket bodies. 

Faiola compared a collision in space to a grenade hitting a car, creating a cloud of debris with small pieces falling into unpredictable orbits – sometimes too small to track from Earth – making them difficult to avoid.

Even tiny fragments traveling at thousands of miles an hour can severely damage satellites, or worse, pierce the space suits of astronauts carrying out work outside their vehicles.

Even if no additional satellites were launched, the amount of debris in orbit would continue to grow because objects are fragmenting faster than debris naturally re-enters the atmosphere, Tim Flohrer, the European Space Agency’s Head of Space Debris, told CNBC, warning that it could make “certain orbits unusable.”

“Active satellites must perform an increasing number of collision-avoidance maneuvers to dodge out of the way of other satellites and fragments of space debris,” he said, highlighting several debris removal and in-orbit servicing missions it is supporting.

The business case

Astroscale develops spacecraft for debris removal and other in-orbit services.

“That means that we’re building spacecraft that are designed to be very agile, designed to safely operate in and around other spacecraft in orbit,” Faiola said.

It is one of the few commercial companies that has demonstrated the ability to dock with another spacecraft in orbit through a magnetic capture system. That’s a difficult task given objects in lower Earth orbit move at the speed of 7 or 8 kilometers per second – faster than the speed of a bullet – and can tumble uncontrollably. 

Astroscale is also seeing growing demand from the defense sector, where its technology has potential military applications, Faiola said.

While the company reported a 142% revenue surge in the fiscal year ended April and is building a sizable order book, it is still burning cash and posting large operating losses. It continues to derive a big share of project income from government grants. 

This is still a nascent, deep-tech market, so initial contracts are coming largely from space agencies and governments, which will demonstrate to the private sector that this is a viable business, Faiola said. “In the future, we would expect that this would be paid for by operators of constellations of spacecraft.”