As the heads of the world’s great space powers – except for the outcast Russia – summit in Italy this week, they are thrashing out strategies to prevent a long-predicted chain reaction of spacecraft collisions from spreading disaster across the orbital zones surrounding Earth.
Across the week-long gathering of the International Astronautical Congress – the planet’s top space assembly – leaders of the European Space Agency have been highlighting their escalating campaign to forestall a breakaway catastrophe that could wreak havoc on the most coveted lanes for astronauts and for the satellite mega-constellations lofted by independent space players like SpaceX and OneWeb.
Yet while many space soothsayers foresee chaos cascading across the heavens, the co-founder of the Seattle-based Starfish Space sees opportunity and riches for the nimblest aerospace start-ups that can clear the celestial sphere of out-of-control satellites and runaway rockets that threaten the future.
Spaceflight engineer Trevor Bennett, who jettisoned a post in the skunkworks lab at the Jeff Bezos rocket design outfit Blue Origin to co-found Starfish, predicts glory and treasure await the designers of spacecraft that can dock with defunct satellites and rogue rockets and send them into high-altitude GEO “graveyard orbits” or crash them into the remote Antarctic seas.
After NASA selected Starfish to lead its first precursor mission to the envisioned “active debris removal” operations of the future, Bennett told me in an interview, his expanding start-up aims to one day become the champion of these “end-of-life” flights across the 2020s.
In the run-up to selecting Styx-like space tugboats to lead these flights, NASA has commissioned Starfish to inspect a series of spacecraft – dead satellites, phantom rockets, or some combination of these – to photograph each target, record its spin rate and assess its suitability to be robotically captured and de-orbited.
It is an incredible honor, Bennett says, for Starfish’s vanguard engineers to have been appointed to spearhead NASA’s first inspections of these ultra-hazardous spacecraft, whose collision might endanger human spaceflight across low Earth orbit.
Bennett’s had a link-up with NASA stretching back a decade, since the agency handpicked him to become a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow when he was a doctoral candidate in the aerospace engineering program of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
While a NASA fellow, he co-authored a series of cutting-edge studies on using the Earth’s magnetic field, and “chaser” spacecraft outfitted with electrostatic docking mechanisms, to counter the tumble of a derelict satellite in order to capture and guide it to a fiery atmospheric reentry.
Since then, Bennett’s developed AI-enhanced guidance and navigation software that will enable Starfish’s Otter spacecraft to approach a target satellite and autonomously dock with it, and stabilise or change its orbital flightpath.
“For the new NASA mission” – set to launch in late in 2026 – Bennett told me, “the current baseline is for Starfish to inspect four orbital objects.”
Starfish’s next-generation spacecraft “Otter has the technological capability to observe and dock with a rocket body or a satellite,” he says.
Powered by an experimental electric propulsion system, Otter will be able to autonomously capture and control “satellites not designed to be docked with,” he says.
Just weeks after commissioning Starfish to co-head NASA’s first steps toward containing the dangers posed by marooned spacecraft, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and second-in-command Pam Melroy have been sketching out proposed U.S. campaigns to bolster safety and security in space with fellow agency heads and across an array of talks at the IAC gathering in Milan.
Melroy, a former Space Shuttle pilot who spent seven years helping assemble the International Space Station, is likely to be a leading advocate inside NASA for limiting space cooperation with Russia after its last test of a hit-to-kill anti-satellite missile created a deadly field of shrapnel that threatened the ISS crew, and for clearing low Earth orbit of hyper-speed missile fragments that still endanger human capsules and space stations.
Orbiting minefields of exploded missiles, along with the proliferation of decommissioned satellites and abandoned rockets that spin around the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour, are all setting the stage for a ricocheting series of smash-ups across low Earth orbit that could make this high-traffic shell around the globe uninhabitable for all but robotic explorers, says Darren McKnight, Senior Technical Fellow at LeoLabs, the world’s top independent spacecraft tracking outfit.
Across a series of interviews, Dr. McKnight told me that low Earth orbit now holds 1742 satellites that can no longer be piloted by their Earth-based operators, plus 980 ghost rockets that wildly spin through space. McKnight is presenting a half-dozen remarkable studies on these specter sats and rocket stages at the IAC Congress.
LeoLabs, with its globe-spanning network of phased array radars, continuously tracks all of these spacecraft as they speed through orbit, and notifies space players when collisions are projected in the future.
European Space Agency directors used the IAC forum this week to showcase their world-leading Zero Debris Charter, which calls on all spacecraft operators to completely halt injecting any new rockets or other derelict spacecraft to drift in orbit by the year 2030.
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher took center stage at the Congress, which attracts the globe’s foremost space scholars and spacecraft operators, to personally sign a new €119-million contract commissioning the Italian spacecraft designer D-Orbit to dock with a colossal satellite in geostationary orbit – 35,000 kilometers above the Earth – stabilise the sat’s trajectory, and propel it across an extended lifetime.
ESA is now at the global forefront in pioneering agreements and spaceflight missions aimed at countering the dangers of cast-off satellites and rocket stages, says Ian Christensen, a senior director at the Washington-based space think tank Secure World Foundation.
The U.S. should expand its own blueprints to safeguard the orbital rings around Earth that could speed up or halt the next phase of human space missions, he says.
Over the last two years, leading backers of space exploration in the United States Senate have twice introduced the ORBITS Act, which would provide $150,000,000 to conduct demo flights on deorbiting the most dangerous space objects, but so far the House of Representatives has not voted on the legislation.
LeoLabs has urged passage of the bill, Darren McKnight says, to supercharge the potential American role in leading a worldwide drive to prevent a runaway series of orbital collisions.
Trevor Bennett says the promise of a spate of demonstration missions called for under the ORBITS Act “would be good for space and for Starfish.”
He also says Starfish Space has sealed agreements this year with the U.S. Space Force and with the satellite titan Intelsat to send its Otter spacecraft into the lofty regions of geosynchronous orbit to conduct “life extension” missions: each Otter can act as a “jetpack,” he says, that can add years of operation to the target satellite and renew its ability to conduct “collision avoidance maneuvers” while maintaining a stable flightpath.
Geostationary orbit tends to host gigantic, sophisticated and costly satellites, and there are likely about 700 of these GEO spacecraft flying now, says LeoLabs’ McKnight.
That means there are billions upon billions of dollars and euros invested in GEO satellites, Bennett says, each one of which could likely benefit from an extended lifetime delivered by Starfish.
And satellite operators, as they expand their rings of spacecraft, might start funding orbital clearing missions just to protect their flightpaths, he says.
These days, Bennett says, there are “satellite constellations being flown by SpaceX, Planet, OneWeb and later Amazon.”
“There could be 100,000 satellites in orbit by the end of the decade,” he projects.
“Starfish and Otter can allow these satellite operators to keep flying their sats,” he says, and ensure they can avert collisions across their stretched-out lifetimes.
Between the ever-expanding mega-constellations spreading out across the skies and “the new independent space stations” set to be lofted across the 2020s, there almost appears to be a new Manifest Destiny driving the next phase of space discoveries, and with it Starfish’s quickening build-up.
The rush to fill the orbital rings around the globe with constellations and space habitats will likely propel the capture and de-orbiting of ghost rockets and satellites that imperil these increasingly lucrative zones, Bennett predicts.
These simultaneous drives – of space construction and clearing – could present Starfish with almost limitless openings.
So Trevor Bennett foresees not an orbital doomsday ahead, but a resurrection of the hazard-free rings that propelled the start of the first race into space. Space Race II, he adds, could open a new chapter in human civilization, filled with promise and potential.
“The new space stations and the mega-constellations,” he says, “are all part of a new Space Gold Rush.”
