A few weeks ago, on the launch of the amazing company Turion Space, I wrote this comment, which I believe still applies here,

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Congratulations on the launch! I am excited for what you're building. I also love your website. :)

This comment isn't meant to be negative. What you're doing is exciting and amazing. Nothing anyone says should detract from that. However, I have broader questions and (market) skepticism after being around people starting such companies.

Most of the questions here are deal with the technical. But I think you folks will solve that and then some. For those who aren't as familiar with the field, autonomous rendezvous, docking, and servicing has been possible for 15+ years. DARPA's Orbital Express mission autonomously rendezvoused, docked, and replaced a target vehicle's flight computer in 2007, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Express .

My questions mostly revolve around the business side, who is going to pay for it and why?

Here is my current understanding of the issue:

Orbital debris removal is a tragedy of the commons problem which makes who pays for it and why muddled in the best of circumstances. The market situation right now is not the best of circumstances. Currently, to the best of my knowledge, there is no single stakeholder who is impacted enough to unilaterally take action. It isn't a pain point - yet. Most of the valuable orbits, like the sunsynchronous orbits do not have enough debris to degrade service. The most valuable orbit - GEO - is managed actively to avoid service degradation through debris.

The debris that does exist is mostly from the Chinese Anti-Satellite weapons test + the Cosmos + Iridium conjunction event. This debris is concentrated around the 750km to 850km, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-cataloge... and these orbits aren't valuable enough for this to be a concern, as of now.

There is some concern around the mega-constellations, but SpaceX's constellation will be at around the 550km mark. If the worst does happen, and we have a cascade, then all the debris will be deorbit itself in less than a decade. And it - most likely - won't significantly impact any other services except in a ±20km altitude of the cascade. Kuiper will be at 630km, so that is likely to take longer (the orbital lifetime for an object w.r.t. altitude is an exponential one), but it is manageable.

OneWeb's constellation is more worrying at 1,2000km, but AFAICT, they won't send up enough assets for it to be a significant concern. Space is big after all.

Furthermore, no country has - so far - ever, without express permission, rendezvoused, docked, and altered the orbit of an object by another country. Someone involved with UNOOSA put it to me this way, you can look all you want, but you can't touch. You can come close to another country's satellite, you two can peak at each other, take photos of one another, try and measure the other's payload etc. But you can't do a hard (or soft) capture of one another, because that is a declaration of war. IANAL, but short of getting a contract with the Chinese Govt. you can't actually address the largest source of space debris - it would be an act of war. For debris where the ownership is muddled or the organization is no longer extant, the "how much are people willing to pay for this" factor doesn't seem to eclipse the "will this cause diplomatic incident/spark a war" factor. It doesn't seem like a profitable beehive to poke.

As far as I can see, there isn't a single stakeholder with an orbital debris hair on fire problem right now. All of my friends who have started a company around debris have ended up pivoting into the satellite servicing market, much in the same way as you indicate. However, even there there are concerns that make the problem domain difficult for a successful business to operate in.

The hard capture business is the national security business. You can see that with Momentus. I am unaware of any other industry where such a thing happens, but the DoD explicitly had the company remove its Russian CEO and had him divest all of his assets before allowing the company to proceed with operations,

> In-space transportation company Momentus says its Russian co-founders are now “completely divested” from the company as it reaches a national security agreement with federal agencies.

> In March, Momentus announced that Kokorich and Brainyspace LLC, the company owned by Khasis and his wife, had put their shares into a voting trust and would divest them within three years. The move, the company said, was in response to correspondence from the Defense Department in January “stating Momentus posed a risk to national security as a result of the foreign ownership and control of Momentus by Mikhail Kokorich and Lev Khasis and their associated entities.”

https://spacenews.com/russian-co-founders-out-of-momentus/

More privately, I have noticed that all of the startups that have made a viable autonomous rendezvous, docking, and servicing system seem to go dark. I'm guessing this usually coincides with substantial DoD interest and money. As they seem to be the largest (and perhaps only) customer right now.

I would be surprised if Turion Space, as an American company, would be allowed to - legally or otherwise - to service Chinese assets. Based on personal experience, I just don't see that happening short of something extraordinary. Servicing European assets might also fall under some fairly onerous restrictions.

Maybe companies launching smallsats and cubesats might hire you for extending the service lifetime of their missions, but if launch costs truly decrease, then it might be cheaper for them to send up a new mission with better tech than have you service it.

Is my understanding of the market correct? If so, this brings me back to my original question, who is this for? And why will they buy it?

I believe that you can succeed. But I don't know if the market exists yet for you to succeed.

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Space Debris feels like the sitcom startup idea of the space age. It's a problem everyone outside of the space thinks exists, but most people in the space know that it doesn't yet exist. At least not in the way that it can be solved by a private entity - so far.

I might be wrong and I would be extremely happy if it turns out that I am indeed wrong.