Active debris removal is not held back by a shortage of ambition. It is held back by the unglamorous work underneath it: knowing precisely what is in orbit, how it tumbles, and how a vehicle can close on it without making the problem worse. Space Waste starts there, on purpose.
Low Earth orbit now holds on the order of tens of thousands of tracked objects, and a far larger population of fragments too small to catalogue but large enough to end a mission. Each one moves at several kilometres per second, and the relative velocities in a close approach are what turn a simple-sounding task, reach out and capture it, into one of the harder control problems in spaceflight. The discipline that addresses it, Rendezvous, Proximity Operations, Docking and Undocking (RPODU), is decades deep and scattered across agency reports, conference papers, and a handful of hard-won flight campaigns.
- An open research library, beginning with SW-TR-001, our synthesis of forty years of RPODU lessons drawn from public sources.
- Free tools running on live orbital data: the Orbital Debris Tracker, the Earth Rotation Speedometer, and the RPODU Simulator.
- A concept-stage removal vehicle, South Star PROX-M18, in development and described as exactly that.
- An apparel line that funds the work and plants one tree for every shirt.
Field Notes is the working record: a slowly accumulating archive of the research, the tools, and the reasoning behind them, written for readers who already know their orbital mechanics and want to see the work.
We hold no flight hardware, and we describe the program at exactly the stage it occupies. What we hold is real: instruments running on live data, a growing body of analysis, and a defined path from knowledge to capability. Building the archive first is the strategy, not a stand-in for one.
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