LAS VEGAS—Dealing with defunct satellites can cost constellation operators serious money, especially if a broken satellite starts getting in the way of other spacecraft in its orbital shell.
Fresh off demonstrating its mechanical tentacle system capturing an uncontrolled object inside the International Space Station (ISS), startup Kall Morris says it is receiving growing interest in using its technology to shepherd constellations of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites.
The company is in discussions with unnamed LEO satellite constellation operators about using its robotic system to grapple and deorbit satellites that are defunct or at the end of their service life, said Austin Morris, co-founder and director of engineering of Kall Morris, here at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) ASCEND conference.
“Operators of constellations, when one of their assets goes down, that now is threatening all the same ones in that same orbit because they’ve got this carefully choreographed ballet,” he says, describing the close placement of communication satellites on an orbital plane. “A lot of the conversations we’re having right now are with those operators to both remediate those assets and get them out of the way so that they can repopulate that shell.”
There is also growing interest in relying on a robotic service vehicle to deorbit satellites at the end of their lifespan, instead of having the spacecraft carry a reserve of fuel for a final deorbit maneuver, he says.
“They reserve 30% of [propellant] for a deorbit burn at the end of life,” Morris says. “We can provide that service of deorbit at the end, and they can use the remainder of that 30% all the way up until it’s spent for station keeping. That can add potentially three, four or five years to their mission lifespan, which are years during which they are collecting revenue still.”
The idea of robotic deorbiting of a constellation is not entirely new. As part of its planned ELSA-M mission in 2026, Astroscale UK is to demonstrate deorbiting of a Eutelsat OneWeb satellite using a magnetic docking mechanism.
Kall Morris originally was focused on space junk removal, but the company found that as far as the general problem was concerned, “nobody cares,” Morris says. “Everybody thinks it’s somebody else’s problem.”
Tending to a money-making constellation appears to have more interest. That is probably helped by the FCC’s relatively new five-year deorbit rule, which went into effect in September 2024. Compliance is a condition of receiving a radio frequency license. Violations can trigger fines, license modification or revocation, and denial of future applications.
With thousands of communications satellites to be launched in the next several years—for SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Eutelsat OneWeb, Telesat Lightspeed and others—interest in robotic servicing for constellations is likely to grow.