[mabbo]

> the Droid would undock with the debris after dragging it to a low orbit, then orbit-raise, and go on to perform other missions

I'm not orbital mechanic or anything, but my experience with Kerbal Space Program taught me that orbits are really hard to change and match. How many worthwhile pieces of debris are in similar enough orbits that a spacecraft with limited fuel can even reach both of them?

ie: if Droid is at a 55 degree inclined orbit, I can't imagine it could ever reach another object that was at, say, a polar orbit or an equatorial orbit?

[rwesterdahl]

Our current design is capable of just over 1 year of continuous propulsive operation. Feel free to mess with our services tool on the website to simulate various missions to see how many operations a single droid could perform! But to answer your question, yes, several orbital inclinations are highly populated with operational satellites and debris. A mission such as going from 55° inclination to polar would be possible but very expensive (ie would likely drain a significant amount of life out of the Droid on a single mission). This is why we want to build a constellation of vehicles spread across many inclinations.

[enriquto]

> Our current design is capable of just over 1 year of continuous propulsive operation.

> (...) would likely drain a significant amount of life out of the Droid on a single mission

These two sentences are contradictory.

Unless by "continuous propulsive operation" you mean something that is, confusingly, not continuous propulsive operation.

[zamadatix]

They are not contradictory you've just removed the context explaining why they wouldn't put said inefficient thing in a mission plan. There are plenty of objects to clean up without having to shift your orbital inclination so drastically.

[curtainsforus]

Unless it's using a low-thrust-high-efficiency drive such that significant inclination changes take a year.

[mrlowlevel]

Unless of course the maneuver takes a significant part of a year

[ericbarrett]

One thing I can think of is debris from satellites that explode, which tends to stay in the same inclination. This happens from time to time even in deactivated satellites due to Hydrazine and other unstable propellants.

[gridspy]

If you can calculate dV requirements between any two given objects you can treat the orbital maneuvers required as a directed graph.

Then you can apply an adapted travelling salesman algorithm or similar graph optimisation algorithms to choose rendezvous sequences for maximum impact.