Singapore’s Astroscale may have a plan, and the tech, to clean up Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) space junk. At least, that’s what Astroscale’s founder, Nobu Okada, told the TechinAsia website in this post. If you want a visual of all the stuff out there in orbit for grabbing, just watch the video above.
Astroscale is on a quest to solve the problem posed in the video. Astroscale wants to grab the world’s orbital junk. They suggest they will do it in Protoss Carrier fashion, where a satellite “mothership” will send out swarms of smaller satellites (called “satlets”) to tackle the space junk and drag them down into the Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike the carrier, there will be no warping of the satellite into orbit.
Astroscale seems to believe because Singapore isn’t a traditional space rival, such as Russia is to the US, it will not raise worries about the anti-satellite possibilities of Singaporan satellites. For now, for them, it’s a matter of raising enough money to build and launch the satellites in the first place. Anybody can just build a web-page after all, and say a lot of interesting sounding but ultimately meaningless things ;-). It’s the actual building and implementing of the plan that matters.
To help make the plan become a reality and raise money, Astroscale also wants to send a rocket to the moon with Pocari Sweat, a Japanese beverage. The moonshot will supposedly garner interest in his company, and not necessarily the beverage. And so sponsored moonshots begin…
The Mad Spaceball 