ACTION for Orbital Debris

Targeting the ‘hubcap’ class of debris, ACTION proposes a cost-effective nanosat to remove three debris objects per mission from low earth orbit. Utilizing capture, containment, de-spin and drag modules combined with thruster-deorbiting kits, ACTION handles each object’s deorbiting from soup to nuts.

The ACTION approach leverages the scaling affects demonstrated with Starlink to reduce expected remediation costs from $1,600,000/ kg removed, to under $50,000/kg removed.

The consequence of this were unanticipated: it’s cheaper to wait for large satellites to fragment, and then quickly bring them down in pieces, than it is to create larger cleaner-sats.