Before you build a spacecraft that grabs other spacecraft, you read everything anyone has written about the times it nearly went wrong. We spent a stretch doing exactly that, and wrote it up as SW-TR-001.
The richest material is old and unglamorous: NASA NESC lessons from DARPA's Orbital Express, attitude-sensing papers, the Apollo-era habit of stating your assumptions before your equations. One Orbital Express designer, after a tense on-orbit recovery, summed up the whole discipline in four words: "Nav is really important." We put it at the top of the report.
The report is concept-stage analysis, our synthesis of public sources, not flight data we do not have. Saying so plainly is the entire point. You can read the whole thing on the Research page.
Turns out a lot of the future of debris removal is sitting in declassified PDFs. We are completely okay with that.
Read the research →