Hello Space!
As a people we tend to look up to the start and idealize how vast and empty it is in the universe. We see stars shining, moon shining, we wish for luck when we see a shotting star and from time to time, we see one speckle of light slowly moving across the sky. Most of you probably know that it is either our space station (ISS) or some satellite. But have you ever thought that one you see can be piece of trash?
Yes, there are so many not working pieces that even vast space around Earth is becoming full and dangerous. Why dangerous? Maybe not directly for people on Earth (except those in ISS), but dangerous for our lifestyle. In case the collision of two satellites occurs, it can generate enormous number of small pieces flying faster than a bullet. Those can hit another and another satellite and as avalanche make them all trash. This is called the Kessler syndrome. We would have no weather forecasts, no navigation, severe disruption of communication channels, television, aviation, financial sector and even possible states of emergencies due to loss of control over enemy forces. The simplicity of life as we know it would be gone. Such event is now more realistic than ever before as Earths orbits become overcrowded.
…and nowadays there is no established technology which would deal with freely flying dead satellites. But we have to act now because if such incidents start to occur, we would not be able to fly to Space to do something about it. This is where we step in. We’ve established our company – Space scAvengers and we would like to participate in this exciting challenge. One of our goals is to bring technology which would allow us to consolably remove uncontrolled debris from our orbits.
Our journey started during Christmas 2020. The very first idea came from one of the founders – Marek Gebura. He created an ideological white paper where main ideas and possible approaches were first introduced. A few days later two other founders joined – Tomas Balog and Michal Mlaticek. We have started to discuss all the possibilities we have, what we can create and what we can achieve.
As result we realized that the first step in everything ahead of us is to develop technology which would clean our orbits. If we can capture and move all the uncontrolled trash up there then we can move to servicing, recycling, manufacturing. An amazing list of open opportunities.
Deeper study of all the troubles created by debris in Space showed us that the issue needs to be addressed. Otherwise, we may stand on the brink of no way back. We were saddened to realize that after not being able to take care of our planet we are not able to take care of space around us. In the current state there are hundreds and thousands of different pieces which have to be removed in order to safely continue with our lifestyle and space exploration.
Most of the space agencies and space industry players do realize that this problem has to be solved. It was stated by the European Space Agency (ESA) that nowadays they have to maneuver with working satellites at least once a week to avoid possible collisions with uncontrolled debris. This reduces the lifetime of the working satellites due to increased usage of their fuel.