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.
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.
Your grandad speaks truth! Couldn't agree with the vision you laid out more, this is exactly how we see ourselves being an enabler for other businesses and enterprises operating in space.
Great question and I suspect you are correct regarding the impact being small (Tim Dodd the everyday astronaut, made a great youtube video about rocket launch pollution, check that out for sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4). He concluded that even with increased launch rates, the pollution remains small compared to other industries such as the airline industry. Not the same thing, but I'd argue the impact from satellites and debris burning up is less than the rocket it took to get up there in the first place. All that being said, we at Turion Space don't want to build a sustainable future in space at the cost of polluting Earth. For the first missions, we will drag the debris down to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, but long term, we plan to utilize reusable launch vehicle upper stages (think Starship, Relativity, and others) to bring stuff back down for us. It's a bit of an essay for a simple question, but regardless of how polluting it may be, with fully reusable launch vehicles coming online in the same time frame we are looking at performing missions, we will use those to bring stuff back down.
Congrats on the launch!
I have built a job board for the Space industry here is the link if you want to have your job offers on the site.
https://rocketcrew.space/
Exactly! It is a total chicken and egg problem. What I mean is, who will pay to remove stuff if regulations are not set up accordingly? And if nobody will pay to remove stuff, how do you build a business with that premise? The bridge to reaching that point for us is utilizing our spacecraft for satellite servicing at first. Specifically orbit modification, loss mitigation repairs, and asset inspection.
Right now we are primarily focused on building something to address the big stuff because of the possibility of breaking up into thousands of smaller debris. At some point the smaller debris will need to be addressed, in which case its possible something like this would work. That being said Space Lasers may also be a contender, but that comes with the caveat of being classified as a weapon. Either way it will be interesting to see different ideas come to fruition over time, both from our playbook, and from others!
Lasers were my first thought since it requires so much energy to change orbits in order to interact more directly with the debris. What properties are considered when classifying lasers as weapons? Would a lower power laser still be feasible for small debris?
I can think of only two applicable mechanisms of action with lasers, there could be more:
1 - Radiation pressure. This is just momentum exchange between the object and incoming photons. It very clearly has a force and is partly responsible for sending dead spacecraft into a tumbling motion. The challenge with radiation pressure is that it has an extremely small effect relative to the input power, in the range of micronewtons per kilowatt. Low power lasers that would not be considered 'possible weapons' would be effective but over very long timescales.
2 - Ablative reaction. When you ramp the energy level enough to cook off layers of material, the ejection of the particles has a reaction effect that pushes the object in the opposite direction. Fiber laser engravers (YouTube it if you're not familiar) use this as the mechanism for material removal. These lasers have relatively low average power (say 20W-100W), but its delivered in very short high-power pulses necessary to heat just the skin of the material. Because of that, the instantaneous power levels might be 100-500kW, clearly 'weapons' class. It wouldn't have any effect on ground targets but could easily be employed in anti-satellite operations.
I am super stoked about all the other companies working on solutions to the debris problem, and see this problem as too important to leave to any single entity / team (including ourselves!). What differentiates us from some of the other ideas is our overall approach to vehicle design. Besides robot arms, or other capture mechanisms what are we fundamentally trying to do? Move things around. What is the key design parameter for moving things around in space? dV. Our approach to optimizing for this number is unique (more on that another time, can't spoil all the fun just yet!). Our team will move rapidly, copying the Elon playbook approach to building hardware which I'm quite familiar with (8.5 year SpaceX veteran). In regards to hiring, next month we'll begin our hiring ramp so keep an eye on the site if you are interested!
Thanks for the response, y'all sound like a cool group of people. Wish you the best of luck, and I might sneak an application in once you get that hiring page up.
