WASHINGTON ― Three companies ― D-Orbit, Firefly Aerospace and Katalyst Space ― have been awarded contracts by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Space Development Agency (SDA) to design, and eventually demonstrate, the ability to capture and safely bring dead satellites down from orbit.
The end-goal of the “Deorbit-as-a-Service (DaaS)” project is to launch a prototype spacecraft and begin de-orbiting services in 2028 to clean out the many obsolete satellites that continue orbiting Earth long after they’ve outlived their usefulness, one Pentagon official told Breaking Defense.
According to an Aug. 14 LinkedIn post by DIU announcing the awards, the project will allow the Defense Department “to chart a path to deliver in-space transportation and logistics capabilities to the U.S. government on a managed-service basis — ultimately giving the government flexible, on-demand access to orbital logistics without the cost and schedule of owning and operating the mission spacecraft.”
The current awards are small, totalling only $8.4 million to cover delivery of “preliminary” designs by the end of the year, the Pentagon official said, but they noted that each vendor’s contract includes options for future work.
D-Orbit, for example, in its Aug. 13 press release, said its contract has a potential value of $24 million.
DIU’s announcement said the agency and SDA will jointly evaluate each design’s “technical maturity, mission approach, schedule, and affordability before deciding which solution proceeds to a full on-orbit demonstration.”
The rationale for the initiative, according to DIU’s original solicitation issued in February, is to help clear spent or broken satellites from low Earth orbit (LEO), which is becoming increasingly congested as private companies and governments alike pursue large constellations for missions such as internet connectivity, remote sensing and missile tracking. In general, the hundreds or thousands of small, low-cost satellites in these so-called “proliferated constellations” have an operational lifespan of only five years.
“As proliferated constellations expand, satellites that experience anomalies or reach the end of mission persist in orbit as hazards that constrain maneuver space, increase collision risk, and degrade mission resilience,” the DIU solicitation explained.
Spacecraft equipped with these capabilities could also be used in weapons that move a target bird to an orbit where it no longer can perform its function, disable it in some manner or simply smash it.
Indeed, Defense Department officials repeatedly have charged that China’s SJ-21, which in 2022 tugged a defunct Chinese satellite in geosynchronous Earth orbit to a graveyard orbit, is a threat because of its capacity to serve as a space weapon.
The new awards represent an effort to expand the pool of potential commercial vendors for deorbiting services.
SDA in January issued a first-of-its-kind contract for deorbiting services, worth $52.5 million, to Starfish Space to use its Otter spacecraft to safely dispose of expired satellites in their planned Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture of data relay and missile warning/tracking networks. Starfish at the time said it expects to launch next year.
While each of the companies involved envision a slightly different modus operandi, their spacecraft are all being designed to rendezvous with, capture in some manner, move and/or simply provide services such as refueling or repair to satellites that have not been specially equipped to support such operations.
For example, Katalyst Space in its Aug. 14 press release stressed that its NEXUS spacecraft is capable of multiple types of missions. The Colorado-based start up already is under contract with NASA to boost its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to a higher orbit.
Likewise, D-Orbit’s release says that a successful demonstration under the DIU-SDA project will enable it “to accomplish other critical LEO logistics missions for the US government such as refueling satellites, repairing satellites, inspecting satellites, re-positioning satellites, etc.”
Firefly CEO Jason Kim, in an Aug. 13 statement said the firm’s Elytra vehicles “can deorbit satellites of vastly different sizes and configurations to help mitigate the growing space debris challenge our industry is up against.”
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