Earthrise, Apollo 8, December 1968, NASA

Space Waste · Mission Goals

What we are
actually trying to do

Five goals, each small enough to be honest and large enough to matter. No mission statement filler, just the work.

Why This Page Exists

Goals you can hold us to

Plenty of space companies publish a vision. Fewer publish goals specific enough to be checked. These are ours. Each one has a way to tell whether we are making progress, and each one is sized for a small team doing real work, not a press release.

The Goals
01

Prove the hard part is tractable

The difficult problem in active debris removal is approaching a tumbling, non-cooperative object safely. We want to show that a small team can make real progress on it: first in simulation, then on a ground testbed.

Progress signal: a repeatable terminal-phase approach in the RPODU Simulator, then the same logic running hardware-in-the-loop.

02

Keep the research open

Debris is a shared problem, so the learning should be shared too. We publish our technical work instead of locking it away, so others can check it, use it, and build past it.

Progress signal: a growing public research library, with new papers added as the work develops.

03

Make the problem legible

Most people have never heard of the Kessler Syndrome. We build free tools that let anyone see the debris belt, feel the speeds involved, and understand why orbit is worth protecting.

Progress signal: the orbital tracker, speedometer, and Adopt Debris, free and running on real data.

04

Fund the work honestly

The awareness side of Space Waste is paid for by apparel, not by overselling hardware we have not built. Buy a shirt, fund a tool. That is the whole arrangement.

Progress signal: apparel revenue flowing into free tools and open research, with no vaporware promises attached.

05

Stay compliance-first

Rendezvous and proximity technology is dual-use and export-controlled. We work with that reality openly: no false heritage, no invented partnerships, and no claim we cannot back up.

Progress signal: every public claim traceable to something real, and an ITAR-aware posture from day one.

A NOTE ON HONESTY: South Star PROX-M18 is in development. It has not flown and is not for sale. These goals describe a direction of travel, and the roadmap shows the phases between here and there.

SW-GO-001 · Mission Goals · Rev A