Gen. David Thompson: “The more we can depend on commercial space for routine activities such as transportation and debris removal, the more we can focus on national security.”
WASHINGTON – US Space Force Vice President David Thompson said it would make sense for the government to pay companies to clean up space debris if such services exist.
Orbital debris represents a risk to spacecraft and to safe space operations, Thompson said in an interview with National Security Analyst John Nagl of the Research Policy Institute on March 16.
“I will pay per tonne if they can remove rubbish,” Thompson said. There are no companies that can do this today.
Nagl said someone in the audience asked if Thompson had heard of Astroscale, a company in Japan that operates in Denver, Colorado, and that plans to remove debris later this week.
Thompson said he was not aware of the company. “I’ll have to Google it,” he said.
Regardless of which companies in the space industry ultimately provide successful space debris cleaning services, the Space Force would be a customer, Thompson said.
“The more we can depend on commercial space for routine activities such as transportation and debris removal, the more we can focus on national security,” he said.
Space debris contains man-made objects such as dysfunctional spacecraft and abandoned launch vehicle stages, and fragments of the breakdown of rocket bodies and spacecraft.
The European Space Agency estimates that there are 3,600 working satellites in orbit and 28,200 debris. More than 10,000 satellites are expected to orbit the Earth over the next decade.
Astroscale will fly on Saturday with the first commercial mission to demonstrate technology for docking and removing space debris. The company will launch a satellite called End-of-Life Services at Astroscale Demonstration (ELSA-d) on a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Food Modroom in Kazakhstan.
The spacecraft ELSA-d has a service and a customer satellite that will be launched together. The service person will use close-up technologies to connect to the customer satellite, which will simulate a piece of debris.