General David Thompson: “The more we can rely on commercial space for routine activities such as transportation and waste disposal, the more we can focus on national security.”
WASHINGTON – US Space Force Deputy Chief of Space Operations General David Thompson said it would make sense if the government paid companies to clean up space junk if such services exist.
Orbital debris poses a risk to spacecraft and to safe operations in space, Thompson said in an interview with National Security Analyst John Nagl of the Foreign Policy Research Institute on March 16.
“I pay per ton if they can remove debris,” said Thompson, noting that there are no companies that can do that today.
Nagl said someone in the audience asked if Thompson had heard of Astroscale, a Japan-based company with operations in Denver, Colorado that plans to launch a debris removal mission later this week.
Thompson said he was unaware of the company. “I’ll have to go that Google,” he said.
Regardless of which companies in the space industry successfully provide space debris cleaning services, the Space Force would be a customer, Thompson said.
“The more we can rely on commercial space for routine activities such as transportation and debris removal, the more we can focus on national security,” he said.
Space junk includes man-made objects such as non-functional spacecraft and abandoned stages of launch vehicles, and fragments of the disintegration of rocket bodies and spacecraft.
The European Space Agency estimates that there are 3,600 working satellites in orbit and 28,200 debris objects. More than 10,000 satellites are planned to be launched into low Earth orbit over the next decade.
Astroscale will fly the first commercial mission on Saturday to demonstrate technologies for docking and removing space debris. The company will launch a satellite called End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration (ELSA-d) on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The ELSA-d spacecraft has a servicer and a client satellite that will be launched together. The servicer will use proximity rendezvous technologies to dock at the customer’s satellite simulating a piece of debris.