Economic Approach for Active Space Debris Removal Services

The space environment is getting more and more populated with first collisions of satellites already happening. This paper presents a technical implementation of a modular system for active space debris removal, which can be implemented gradually and flexible, adaptable to mission needs or future technologies developed. The flexible approach to remove empty upper stages or satellites no longer in operation considers a dual-robotic arm concept to manage the rendezvous with these non-cooperative targets. The concept foresees attaching de-orbit devices to debris elements, based on either chemical propellants or electromagnetic tethers. While these de-orbit devices will burn up with each object being removed, the removal satellite core is maintained and used for additional de-orbit missions. Besides an efficient technical implementation, special focus is paid to the commercial assessment of such space debris removal service. For this purpose, the constraints as well as the opportunities for an economically viable implementation are presented and discussed, showing that the increasing awareness of the space debris problem bears the chance for a commercially viable business case. The work presented in this paper has been conducted in the course of the 12th SpaceTech post-graduate master program on space systems and business engineering by TU Delft.