[orky56]

Ryan and team, fellow space & space debris nerd here in OC as it seems like you're all based in SoCal. Would love to connect offline and share some (somewhat dated) research I've done in the space and see how I can help you all out. My email is in my profile.

Some initial questions I had:

-How are you dealing with fragmentation that is natural once incidental contact is made with space debris?

-What types of space debris are you targeting based on original designs, what can be potentially salvaged, etc.?

-What federal and international agencies have you had to deal with for permission, funding, and just general education to ensure your ideas get off the ground?

-What is the timeline between now and tomorrow where a clean sky is no longer possible to ensure this problem gets addressed sooner than later?

Very excited to see your progress with this vision!

[tpierceturion]

Hello! We would love to chat with you offline, you can message us your contact information through our website with your email or email us at [e-mail].

I'll try to answer these:

-Fragmentation I'm assuming you are referring to the debris clouds of small objects after a conjunction. This is a very hard problem. We are starting with removal of large-uncontrolled objects before they collide. The solution to removing those small pieces of debris might be something very different such as insertion of clouds of inert gas or giant balloon type sweeps.

-Initial design is based on orbit modification of operational satellites then moving to defunct satellites or spent upper stages. Salvaged material could hopefully be entire satellites in the future. We have some friends at Inversion space working on re-entry vessels. The possibility of space-based recycling centers is also exciting.

-We have talked with Space Force, US department of Space Commerce, NASA, consultants. One of our advisors on the team is Kevin O'Connell to help with this. We also joined the group started by DARPA called CONFERS to work with others in the industry to develop standards.

-The timeline has been fairly well modeled by aerospace corp using monte-carlo simulations. You can find an old version of this in the "Catcher's Mitt" report. The models will drastically under-predict the problem if more conjunctions occur like the Iridium incident, however so it's really hard to say. The short answer is that ~10 high-risk objects need to be removed per year to stabilize the issue.