Launch HN: Turion Space (YC S21) – Space debris removal and satellite servicing
Orbital debris poses a significant risk to mankind's future in space. There are currently over 250k objects in space that would destroy a satellite if a collision were to occur. Large uncontrolled objects like depleted rocket upper stages and dead satellites pose the greatest risk because of the potential to break upon impact with small debris into thousands of smaller pieces. There is currently no system in operation that can deorbit large amounts of space debris. If this problem is not addressed in the next 5-10 years, it could render entire orbits unusable for generations.
Our spacecraft (which we’ve decided to call the “Droid”, shoutout to Star Wars!) aims to remove debris by docking with it using robotic arms and dragging the debris to a lower orbit using the ion propulsion system we are developing under a NASA technology transfer license. Once the debris is in a low enough orbit, upper atmospheric drag will cause the debris to naturally decay in altitude until it burns up during atmospheric reentry. Critically, the Droid would undock with the debris after dragging it to a low orbit, then orbit-raise, and go on to perform other missions. In other words, our solution is a reusable approach, designed from the beginning to complete multiple missions during its lifetime.
Our team encountered this problem when brainstorming ideas to answer the question, "with the rapidly declining cost of getting things into space, what can we do now that has never before been possible?" Asteroid mining seemed like the obvious answer, but the capital required to start a business on that premise seemed like a longshot to say the least. We found the most important problem we could solve while building the foundation to asteroid resource extraction was to create a satellite system capable of removing orbital space debris.
Our team has extensive experience working on operational space flight hardware and building software products from the ground up. Ryan comes from an 8.5-year run at SpaceX, working primarily on propulsion development and dynamics analysis of the Merlin, Superdraco, and Raptor engines. Tyler comes most recently to ATA engineering, working as a consultant for various aspects of thermal, structural, and dynamics analysis across a wide range of now-operational space-flight projects. He also worked at Electroimpact, where he designed and built aerospace-assembly-automation systems using robotic arms. Patryk comes most recently from Marshall Reddick real estate where he developed the company’s in house CRM that was vital to the company's growth over the last 5 years.
We expect to begin servicing sometime in 2024. We have gained interest in several use cases through conversations with customers to complement our orbital debris removal efforts, beginning with low-earth-orbit operations. For low-earth-orbit satellite operators, we can raise their altitude or modify the inclination of their orbit. We have also partnered with launch providers to expand their mission capabilities by offering our last mile tug service for their payloads. For example, suppose a small launcher can only lift a 200 kg satellite into a 500km orbit altitude, but that payload wishes to end up at a 1200km altitude. In that case, we can dock with the payload once it has been deployed from the launch vehicle and bring it to its final orbit.
Check out the services section of our website at https://turionspace.com/satellite-tracker and track satellites or get pricing estimates for different mission scenarios! We'd love to hear feedback and chat about orbital debris removal!
115 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadIf there's some debris in space, who pays to clean it up? Is it a company that wants to use an orbit that might be affected? Or is debris attributable and the 'owner' pays to clean up their own mess? Or is there a fund that a consortium of governments and businesses that use space should (will?) pay into?
I can imagine that the tech to do clean up is eminently achievable, and getting something to orbit to actually do the job is likely to be cheap enough soon, but I can't quite imagine why anyone would actually be a customer of a space cleaning company.
Countries can just tax them at launch time based on the payload
One model is that certain orbits do become owned by some major power or private company.
When you own certain orbits, it's your responsibility to keep them clean.
The liability for any debris that hits something else in space, or hits something on Earth, lies with the launching nation of said debris. This has already occurred and been resolved once, when a USSR spy satellite hit northern Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
I imagine if an incident were to occur and the launching nation didn’t compensate the UN security council could ultimately enforce some kind of punishment. If one of the permanent five refused, since all five are satellite launching nations, or closely tied (UK) to a satellite launching nation, there will be immense pressure to settle up.
https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/
So if we're going to charge someone for this, first and foremost are the US and Chinese militaries.
Who's going to make them pay up?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
Individual needles are probably too small for radar to track, but not too small to punch a hole in your vessel.
Fortunately some have re-entered.
The big debris problem is much closer to the earth in the cloud of crap between LEO and MEO.
Are there some graphs with current and projected costs per kg to different orbits?
Couple more questions:
1. Do you need to refuel your fleet in orbit? Does that require a new tech, or that already exists? I suppose ISS gets regular shipments as well, but your approach probably needs to be unmanned?
2. What do you hope to get out of YC? Do they have some particular expertise or connections?
1. We are utilizing highly efficient electric propulsion that eliminates the need for refueling to make money, but when refueling in orbit does become available you bet we'll be at the front of the line at Space Chevron 2. YC has been an enormous help with getting us started. They drilled the single most important thing into our skulls for really any startup - talk to customers. Besides their amazing network, the group partners have really helped us focus on what is important in order to make our vision a reality. If you are considering, apply to YC!!
[0] https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2021/4/12/49782598-1...
Even here on the surface there are places with debris not cleaned up, because the cost is too high.
I think the services aspect is the way to go. Forget about debris. Yes that's a big problem, but it doesn't seem to have a sufficiently motivated customer.
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!
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.
1. I know there are a few other startups/companies working on similar technology. What differentiates y'all? I think Turion is the only one I've seen come out of YC though.
2. Don't see a careers page on your website. Are you hiring?
Godspeed!
Interactive entertainment software and accompanying instruction manuals sold as a unit, namely, computer game software and manuals sold as a unit, video game software and manuals sold as a unit; video game software, computer game software, and pre-recorded CD-ROMs and DVDs featuring games, films, music, computer game software, and video game software; downloadable video game software and downloadable computer game software
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=77580336&caseType=SERIAL_...
https://www.phonedaddy.com/products/motorola-droid-maxx-veri...
It sounds ridiculous but v^2 scales quickly and if you can achieve anything close to the exhaust velocity from ion thrusters combined with retrograde orbit you can start knocking on the door of 100km/s impact velocity. That’s ~5J per microgram.
Obviously a tremendous number of challenges (puff coherency over great distances, accuracy over same, stationkeeping, etc) but interesting to me nonetheless.
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.
Sounds _exactly_ what ClearSpace is doing under their ESA contract.
https://clearspace.today/
CisLunar Industries [1] for example wants to harvest and process metal from debris on orbit.
Their initial application is to create metal fuel rods for thruster technology being developed by Neumann Space [2].
[1] https://www.cislunarindustries.com
[2] https://neumannspace.com
Back in 2015, I was part of an EU Marie Curie ITN network called Stardust [1] working on something similar.
We utilized robotic arms and a novel non-contact, detumbling technology (using eddy currents) to approach and remove Ariane rocket bodies [2].
It was a fascinating project and I subsequently worked on investigating mission analysis approaches to compute multi-target rendezvous sequences, specifically assessing the impact of orbital perturbations on the use of semi-analytical transfer leg design algorithms [3].
You might be interested in the follow-up to the Stardust network, dubbed Stardust-R [4]. Happy to connect you with any of the organizations involved if it's helpful.
It was the frustration of trying to manually deal with collecting information for component, subsystem, and system trade studies that led to me wondering if an 'amazon for space' [5] wouldn't help engineers focus on the really hard engineering instead of Googling :) [shameless plug]
Would love to learn more about your Droid platform if you're interested in chatting!
[1] https://www.stardust2013.eu
[2] https://www.dfki.de/web/forschung/projekte-publikationen/pub...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02731...
[4] http://www.stardust-network.eu
[5] https://satsearch.com
What altitudes do you propose for this? De-orbiting something from geostationary orbit this way would take a huge amount of fuel. But deorbiting targets from lower orbits would provide little time for your droid to accelerate and avoid itself being slowed at the low end of the new orbit.
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?
> (...) 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.
Then you can apply an adapted travelling salesman algorithm or similar graph optimisation algorithms to choose rendezvous sequences for maximum impact.