Ariel Ekblaw

There's a couple of different ways to deal with it.

One, we have to stem the tide.

So we have to have really responsible actors who are no longer contributing to additional debris.

The FAA made a ruling that any new objects that are launched to space...

have to have a provable deep orbit plan.

You have to convince the FAA that your object is going to burn up completely on reentry and be incinerated, so it's not going to contribute to space debris.

The other project is to remediate.

And so go and actually clean up the existing debris.

And there's some really cool ideas.

Think Pac-Man.

In space, basically going through with a net, a big magnet, with some ability to collect over time enough debris that you have enough mass that you begin to feel the effect of drag in the atmosphere and you'd be pulled in and be able to burn up on reentry.

Space is very vast, so even the debris amount that we have now is not hindering us from doing space launches, but we absolutely need to clean it up.

So this is where Rendezvous Robotics comes in again.

This is our startup that's focused on how do you self-assemble things that aren't habitat related, that are big, flat, massive, and would have a really important near-term function like being a solar panel or being a radiator.

It would be way too slow and dangerous to ask a human to go out in an EVA suit, which is what we call an extravehicular activity suit, and go do that by hand, which is how a lot of the International Space Station was built, which is wild.

And we also don't want to rely on a robotic arm.

Too slow, too much risk that it would bump or with too much momentum.

Yeah, exactly.

It's too fragile.

So we really need all these pieces to be able to come together, not all at one time, but gradually attaching to each other, build out a big field, you know, the size of maybe several football fields worth of solar panels.