Earth from Apollo 17

Space Waste · Mission Briefing · Clearance: Public

Somebody has to
clean up orbit

Humanity spent sixty years filling the sky with wreckage and built almost nothing to take it back out. Space Waste is being built to be the cleanup crew. Welcome to the mission.

The Situation

We are quietly losing the sky

More than 34,000 tracked objects tear around Earth right now, alongside an estimated 140 million fragments too small to track. Each one is a hypervelocity bullet that can end a working spacecraft in an instant. The Kessler Syndrome, a chain reaction of collisions that can wall off entire orbits for generations, is no longer a thought experiment. It has already started.

Space Waste exists to push back. We are building the research, the software, and a Rendezvous, Proximity Operations, Docking & Undocking (RPODU) unit in development called South Star PROX-M18. The apparel side funds free public tools and open research while the hardware grows up, so every shirt is a vote for a cleaner sky and, through One Tree Planted, a tree in the ground.

The Gap

Help is not on the way

Radars catalogue the debris. Agencies publish reports about it. Dashboards count it climbing. What almost no one on this planet is doing, at any real scale, is removing it. A handful of demonstrations have flown. The belt fills faster than anyone clears it. The orbital commons has no janitor. We are changing that.

34,000+Tracked orbital objects
140M+Untracked fragments
~7.5 km/sAverage debris velocity (LEO)
$900B+Value of at-risk space assets
Why It Matters

Orbit is infrastructure

GPS, weather forecasting, banking, communications, climate monitoring: the systems that run modern life all live in orbit. Lose the key orbital shells and you do not just slow the space economy, you reach down and degrade life on the ground. The mission is simple to say and hard to do: keep orbit open, safe, and usable for the next hundred years.

ISS in low Earth orbit
The International Space Station orbits within the most congested debris belt · NASA / public domain
Go Deeper
SW-RM-001

Roadmap

The real climb from concept and simulation to a ground demonstrator and, eventually, a flight demonstrator. TRL by TRL, nothing skipped, the hard parts marked.

View the roadmap → SW-GO-001

Goals

Five goals specific enough to be checked, each with a way to tell whether we are actually making progress. The opposite of a mission-statement word cloud.

See the goals → TECH

Technology

The technology portfolio: RPODU systems, autonomous navigation, capture approaches, and satellite servicing. What we are building, and why it is hard.

Explore the tech → SW-TR

Research

Open technical reports on terminal-phase RPOD and the problems around it. We publish what we learn so anyone can check it and build past it.

Read the research →

SW-MS-001 · Mission Overview · Rev C