Ars: You have another mission working with JAXA, ISSA-J1, to go rendezvous and inspect two decommissioned Japanese satellites. How is that different than inspecting a rocket body?
Blackerby: ADRAS-J2 is going to an oblong rocket body. It’s not spinning. ISSA-J1 is going to satellites, and it’s going to have to approach something that has a solar array sticking out, so we’re expecting that it could be spinning. So the RPO (rendezvous and proximity operations) is definitely going to be more complex. We need to be able to develop this tech to precisely approach this large piece of debris that likely is not going to be a stable object, and we’re also going to a couple of them with ISSA-J1. A lot of the technical capabilities that we’ve developed by building out all of our missions… they share a common baseline in terms of technology as we think about the guidance, navigation and control, and the visualization and the RPO that’s necessary to do this identification and approach. But there are all these little differences, and that’s why each mission is unique in its own way, and it all builds to this larger dataset of learnings that we’re developing, and all of this is in pursuit of this servicing ecosystem. If we’re going to get to this level of servicing ecosystem for all aspects of security and economics and the sustainability of the space environment, we need to have this large dataset of approaching objects, of identifying objects, and of capturing objects, and so that’s what we’re building out across the board in the portfolio of our missions.
Ars: So you’re crawling before walking or running?
Blackerby: That’s it. Our first mission, ELSA-D, that was definitely a crawl. In that case, we brought our debris with us, and let that go, and then showed we could capture it. That was the first step.
- Astroscale’s ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15, 2024.
Ars: What is the operational use case for the technology Astroscale is developing?
Blackerby: I’m assuming you mean like repeatable, consistent servicing. Every step we take is another step toward that goal. It’s hard for us to give a specific date on that or a timeframe. But the fact is, we’ve got eight, nine missions under manufacturing right now around the world. We have a variety already that are out there. None of them are on the level of, say, a repeatable multi-order service yet. That’s going to come. It’s just a matter of time. The missions that we’re doing now, we’ve taken these incremental steps. ELSA-D, our first mission, was fully internally funded. That was funded by the money that we raised on the equity markets. ADRAS-J, the second mission, that was that was jointly funded with JAXA, so we worked on that together. ELSA-M, we’re working on that together with ESA and the UK Space Agency. With ADRAS-J2, we’re getting toward being revenue-positive with these missions. Our missions going forward, for the most part, are revenue-positive. If we look at that from the perspective of sustainability, not of space, but of our company, economic financial sustainability, we’re already getting to that point. We need to get more toward a commercially repeatable mission, and we’re not there yet. But we’d like to see, by the early part of the next decade, the early 2030s, that we’re going to start seeing a more consistent, commercially viable servicing ecosystem being developed.