The Orbital Index

Falcon 9 booster as a research and return vehicle. Startup Besxar Space Industries de-stealthed last week to announce a launch deal with SpaceX, which will fly 24 reusable, microwave-sized manufacturing payloads on 12 upcoming Falcon 9 first-stage boosters. The company was founded in 2023 by Ashley Pilipiszyn, an early employee of OpenAI. They believe that the vacuum and microgravity environment of space can be utilized to manufacture next-gen, higher-quality semiconductors for GPUs and other applications. On Earth, gravity results in buoyancy‑driven convection and sedimentation, and imperfect vacuums can lead to trace gas defects in thin-film epitaxial deposition and crystal growth. We’re somewhat skeptical of the vacuum quality and duration available to a Falcon 9 first stage during boostback, but it’s certainly clever to use the booster for rapid return and turn around, which could enable faster iteration early on before moving on to longer orbital durations. The use of the readily available LEO vacuum for manufacturing was explored during the Shuttle era with the free-flying Wake Shield Facility, which demonstrated a vacuum on the order of 10^-10 Torr. The vacuum, microgravity, and thermal stability of space are all clear benefits that companies will leverage as launch costs continue to move down the price curve. Companies in this space include Varda (crystallized Ritonavir, an HIV/AIDS protease inhibitor), Redwire (ZBLAN, optical crystals, ceramics, human heart tissue, pharmaceuticals, and more), Flawless Photonics (ZBLAN), along with up-and-comers Space Forge (similar semiconductor ambitions), BioOrbit, Outpost Space, Orbital Matter, and more. 

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A brief history of space debris. ESA now estimates that over 140 million pieces of space debris, each larger than 1 mm, are traveling in Earth’s orbit at an average velocity of 7-8 km/s (roughly similar to a jackhammer hitting a spot the size of the tip of a pencil). As the number of defunct and fragmented human-made objects in space rapidly increases, so do the hazards they present—this number has grown from estimates of ~35M fragments ≥1mm in 1995. The Tiangong Space Station’s core module, Tianhe, launched in 2021 and was impacted by a Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) event within just two years. The impact damaged solar panels, causing a partial loss of power, necessitating two spacewalks for repairs and the installation of external debris protection devices. The 25-year-old International Space Station (ISS) has performed more than 30 in-orbit maneuvers to avoid satellites and trackable space debris. MMOD damage over the years to the ISS has impacted Russian Progress and Soyuz vehicles, Canadarm2, and one of the seven windows of the cupola. When the Resurs-P1 satellite broke apart in 2024, creating more than 100 pieces of trackable debris, the ISS crew took emergency shelter in their return vehicles for over an hour. Two major incidents in the early 2000s created substantial debris fields in low Earth orbit: China's 2007 anti-satellite (ASAT) test produced >3,500 objects larger than 10 cm, and the 2009 collision between Iridium-33 and Cosmos-2251 satellite generated nearly 2,000 similarly sized pieces. A Russian direct ascent ASAT test in 2021 was the most recent large debris generation event, generating 1,500+ trackable fragments that threatened the ISS (cf. a list of additional events). The fear, of course, is that unmitigated space junk could cross a threshold into a cascading, self-sustaining cycle of space debris fragmentation and proliferation, which could make it hard or impossible to continue launches, prohibiting long-term utilization of space—aka Kessler Syndrome. Objects are being launched or fragmenting in space faster than they’re being removed by natural orbital decay—and so far, while progress has been made, international policy and technological advancements to manage and mitigate space waste haven't kept up. National space agencies, the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN), the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and various commercial companies have initiatives that address space debris issues. Some solutions for cleaning up low-to-medium orbit space junk involve detection, tracking, scheduled deorbit via passive or active systems, and improving craft designs (passivation, enhanced shielding for protection, shedding minimization, collision avoidance systems, etc.). Innovative techniques have been proposed for capturing, tugging, nudging, ablating, harpooning, tethering, and recycling objects. A few of the more entertaining-sounding cleanup methods include a foam-lattice ejecting craft, an air-blowing ‘huff-and-puff’ Space Debris Elimination satellite, capturing debris in an inflatable bag, and laser brooms that use either thrust from ablation or just photon pressure to deorbit target spacecraft. Debris management is a hard problem, but a tractable one with cooperation.

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• This week marks 25 years since Expedition 1 launched, the first long-duration expedition to the ISS, in which a three-person crew lived aboard the station for 136 days, starting the ISS’s still-uninterrupted human occupation. 
• ISS in Real Time is a new site that visualizes the station’s history and joins the incredible Apollo in Real Time.
• NASA’s Quiet Supersonic Jet Takes Flight.
• ‘NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown—and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say’
• We mentioned NASA’s (threatened) and ESA’s (planned) Venus missions last week, but failed to mention other Venusian missions in the works:  ISRO (orbiter packed with science payloads, aiming for 2028) and CNSA (early 2030s, ambitious atmospheric sample return) both have missions in development. And, Rocket Lab + Schmidt Science’s private Morning Star Venus atmospheric probe is progressing toward a launch date next year.
• Jatan Mehta wrote about China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 lunar south pole mission, which includes an orbiter that will spend two months surveying for water before releasing its lander, rover, and hopper to study polar deposits. All these components have their own science payloads and collaborate with the existing lunar relay satellite Queqiao 2. Queqiao 2 will also demonstrate precise long baseline positioning (which has the potential for sub-kilometer accuracy all the way to Jupiter).