Look after our planet by cleaning up space mess

ROBOTS could assist in cleaning up more than one million pieces of “space junk” currently orbiting Earth, an audience at the River & Rowing Museum in Henley heard.

Dr Jason Forshaw, who gave a presentation behalf of space company Astroscale, said it was in humankind’s best interest to clean up the mess it had left behind.

His talk on the growing problem of “space junk” was the first in a series of 10 presentations by industry experts organised as part of The Space Vault exhibition, which began in July.

The attraction, which had previously been on display at the European Space Agency, is one of the UK’s largest private collections of space artefacts.

It features more than 100 rare objects, including the checklists that saved the crew of Apollo 13 when its oxygen tank exploded and lunar dust from the Hadley Rille landing site of Apollo 15.

The collection has been built by Dr Michael Warner, of Queen Street, Henley, over 15 years and will eventually go up for auction in the USA at the end of a five-year tour.

About 30 people attended Dr Forshaw’s talk, where he discussed the growing issue of space debris and the solutions his company, Astroscale, one of the world’s pioneering orbital debris removal companies, is working on fixing.

Dr Forshaw, the head of business development and product strategy, said the space debris removal market is rapidly growing and is expected to be valued at £470m by 2028.

He said: “There is a growing environmental issue that loads and loads of satellites are failing. When satellites fail they just get left there and they naturally collide into each other and create space junk and this has become a real environmental issue. Our business is about going up there and trying to clean up all of this space junk.

“It’s an emerging area, it’s getting more and more consideration these days and the Government is really starting to take notice as it realises that we can’t just keep leaving junk in space.”

Astroscale, a Japanese company which was founded in 2013, currently employs around 200 people in Harwell in Oxford, a hub for space businesses and home to the UK Space Agency.

Research conducted by the company found that there are currently 130 million pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth that are smaller than 1cm. A lot of this tiny debris comes from collisions between orbiting objects and the fragments are too small to be tracked.

There are also more than 40,500 objects greater than 10cm in orbit and more than 12,540 satellites currently orbiting the Earth, more than 2,200 of which are no longer functioning.

Dr Forshaw said: “As you could imagine, some of the junk up there when it re-enters earth, it actually starts to hit things. One piece earlier this year actually hit somebody's house. This type of stuff is going to become more and more relevant in the future.

“When satellites hit each other, eventually services on earth could be impacted because humans use satellites for everything, for GPS in your car, mobiles and financial transactions and other things. If these services were interrupted you might suddenly lose your internet one day or more serious things could happen. I think it’s in humankind’s real benefit that we clear up this mess that we have created.”

Recent examples of debris re-entry included a cylindrical 1kg metal object that struck a house in Naples, Florida in March. The object was a piece of an EP9 battery pallet jettisoned from the ISS in 2021 and survived re-entry.

A month later, a 45kg large fragment was found on a farm in Canada and was suspected to have come from the Axiom 3 Dragon trunk section that re-entered on February 26.

Dr Forshaw explained that Astroscale was currently in the process of developing robots that will capture and remove defunct satellites and other debris from orbit.

One of its creations, ELSA-M, is the world’s first end-of-life servicer capable of removing multiple objects from orbit. It works by docking with an object, lowering its altitude and guiding it into Earth’s atmosphere, where it burns up upon re-entry.

The ELSA-M is still in development and has not yet been launched but Astroscale has successfully tested its technology in smaller-scale missions, using ELSA-d, which has successfully demonstrated the ability to capture and deorbit a single defunct satellite.

Dr Warner curated 12 stories for the exhibition, which cover key moments in space exploration history from the USA and the former USSR. All the artefacts in the collection had been sourced from auction houses with verified legal provenance.

They include salvaged netting from the Apollo 13 mission, a lunar surface spacesuit umbilical from the Apollo 15 mission through which commander David Scott spoke as he stepped off the ladder, lunar dust from Apollo 15 mission and space debris from Salyut 7.

Dr Warner said that following the exhibition, which will end in July, the collection would most likely move on to the Birmingham Science Museum and potentially on to museums in Sweden and the Netherlands.

He said: “It will end its five-year tour in Boston where the whole exhibition will be up for auction. That's the game plan but before then the real plan is it have a lot of fun over the next five years and meet all these fantastic people from space companies and space agencies.”

Dr Warner described his collection as the “mother of all hobbies”.

He said: “I have a daytime job in renewable power. I have been collecting for 15 years and in 2012 new legislation came out in the US granting ownership and sale right to the Apollo astronauts.

“There was a flurry of very valuable but very accessible artefacts on to the auction market because of that new law and I scooped up some of that during that time. I had just sold a company, so I had the resources to do that.

“This is quite likely one of the largest private collections of space exploration artefacts in the UK and it's the only one I am aware of that has been curated into an exhibition. Others will be privately in people’s houses.

“Rather than just do the odd talk to science museums, which we have done over the years, it was to bring everything together into an exhibition, craft the stories, and become a curator.”

The next talk will be on January 9 with Martin Soltau, co-chief executive of Space Solar, an energy technology company. For more information, visit rrm.co.uk/event/the-space-vault-exhibition-events/