NASA awards startup $850K to develop space debris capture bag

In an interview with SpaceNews, TransAstra founder and CEO Joel Sercel explained, "We originally developed this small capture bag prototype to demonstrate asteroid mining in low-Earth orbit with a synthetic asteroid. But we subsequently realized this is the greatest thing ever for orbital debris cleanup."

TransAstra believes it can one day deploy smaller bags to retrieve CubeSats as well as larger ones for rocket parts and even asteroids weighing as much as 50,000 tons. The company also proposes missions that would capture several targets using a single bag.

The benefit of the bag technology over other methods is that "it doesn’t require the target to have any fixture that you can grab onto," Sercel told SpaceNews. "It [also] does not require docking, which is a precision maneuver. You have to be precise enough to open the bag, get the bag around this thing and close the bag."

The space debris problem

TransAstra has also worked alongside space startup ThinkOrbital to study a potential method for transporting debris to an on-orbit processing plant.

The companies recently released a study showing that an on-orbit processing plant could result in a six-fold cost reduction compared with the cost of transporting objects toward a reentry into Earth's atmosphere. What's more, it also reduced the time required to clear debris by about 40 percent.

The space debris problem will continue to grow as more and more satellites and spacecraft are lifted into Earth's orbit. In fact, the dramatic rise in orbital debris over the last few years means we may be closer to seeing a disastrous Kessler Syndrome scenario unfold.

In an interview with Interesting Engineering last year, University of Regina astronomer Dr. Samantha Lawler explained that SpaceX's Starlink constellation has us "right on the edge" of Kessler Syndrome. This could drastically affect astronomical operations as it would appear like we are "inside a snow globe within a couple of hours of sunrise or sunset."

What's more, Lawler said that any cleanup project would be comparable to "collecting bullets" due to the incredibly high speeds at which pieces of debris fly around orbit.

Companies like TransAstra are developing solutions, but they are still unproven technologies. In fact, Swiss company ClearSpace and the European Space Agency recently announced their debris cleanup mission may be delayed. The reason? Their target debris had been impacted by one of the thousands of pieces of space debris zipping around Earth's orbit.