Active debris removal
01 / Mission
Earth orbit is a shared piece of infrastructure that nobody maintains. JUJUME was founded to maintain it: to physically remove the debris and dead satellites that make congested orbits unsafe, and to keep them usable for the operators, crews and science missions that depend on them.
The premise
Nothing in orbit goes away because we stopped using it. That single fact is the reason this company exists.
Six decades of launches have left behind spent rocket bodies, separation hardware, fragments from collisions and break-ups, and satellites that reached the end of their working lives and simply stayed where they were. Below about 500 kilometres, atmospheric drag eventually does the cleaning. Above that it barely helps. At 800 kilometres, which is one of the busiest regions in low Earth orbit, a derelict object can hold its orbit for centuries.
Meanwhile the population of working spacecraft has grown faster in the last ten years than in the previous fifty. Large constellations have made low Earth orbit genuinely useful for communications, imaging and weather, and that usefulness is now the thing at risk. Operators fly avoidance manoeuvres they did not budget for. Insurers price a risk they cannot reduce. Agencies plan crewed missions through shells that contain tens of thousands of objects nobody can steer.
The response so far has been mitigation, and mitigation is the right place to start. Passivate your spacecraft so residual propellant and charged batteries cannot rupture. Design for disposal. Deorbit within a defined window. These rules are sound and they are tightening. But mitigation only governs what gets launched next. It has nothing to say about the thousands of tonnes of uncontrolled mass that is already up there, launched decades before any of it was written down.
Those objects are the problem. They are large, they are massive, and a great many of them sit in the orbits we most want to use. They have no docking interface, no working transponder, no attitude control and no way to help. They will not come down unless something goes up and brings them down.
That is active debris removal, and we treat it as a discipline rather than a demonstration. The hard part is not the idea of catching something in orbit. The hard part is doing it repeatedly, affordably, and without producing a single new fragment in the process.
Origins
Four mechanisms account for nearly all of it. Only the first two are matters of choice, and only removal addresses what the other two leave behind.
01
A satellite reaches the end of its mission, or fails before it gets there, and stays in its operating orbit. Several thousand non-functional spacecraft are in orbit now. Many were never designed with disposal in mind, and a significant share of the rest failed in a way that made self-disposal impossible.
02
Roughly two thousand spent rocket bodies remain on orbit, along with adapters, separation rings and deployment hardware. Upper stages are the worst of the population by mass: a single one can weigh several tonnes, and because they were delivered to useful orbits by definition, they sit directly in traffic.
03
Residual propellant, pressurised tanks and aging batteries have caused hundreds of on-orbit break-ups since the start of the space age. Passivation requirements exist precisely because of this history, but they were introduced long after a great deal of hardware was already in place.
04
When two objects meet at orbital velocity, both are converted into thousands of tracked fragments and far more untracked ones, spread across a range of altitudes. Each fragment then becomes a new collision risk. This is the feedback loop that makes the problem self-sustaining once it starts.
The physics
The population you can see is not the population that matters. Most of what can destroy a satellite is too small to catalogue and too large to shield against.
Collision energy scales with the square of relative velocity. In low Earth orbit, two objects on crossing paths can close at ten kilometres per second or more, which means a fragment the size of a fingernail carries enough energy to destroy a spacecraft outright. Shielding can protect against millimetre-scale particles. Nothing practical protects against centimetre-scale ones, and those are exactly the objects that are too small to track reliably and too numerous to avoid.
This is what turns a crowding problem into a cascade problem. Each break-up raises the collision probability for everything in the neighbourhood, which raises the probability of the next break-up. The scenario has a name in the literature, and the point of it is not that orbit becomes impassable overnight. The point is that the debris population can become self-generating: beyond a certain density, fragments beget fragments whether or not anyone launches anything else.
Avoiding that outcome does not require removing everything. It requires removing the right things. A relatively small number of large, massive, poorly placed derelicts dominate the long-term risk, because each one is simultaneously a big target and a large reservoir of potential fragments. Take those out of the busiest shells and you remove a disproportionate share of the future debris population before it exists.
| Class | Estimated population | Trackable | Consequence of an impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Large derelicts | Several thousand rocket bodies and dead satellites | Yes, individually catalogued | Catastrophic for both objects, and the source of thousands of new fragments |
| Larger than 10 cm | About 40,000 | Yes, screened by surveillance networks | Mission ending. Avoidance is possible when the conjunction is seen in time |
| 1 cm to 10 cm | About 1,100,000 | Largely not | Mission ending, with little or no warning and no practical shielding |
| 1 mm to 1 cm | About 130,000,000 | No | Degrades surfaces and optics, punctures tanks, severs harnesses |
Regulation
Disposal is moving from good practice to licence condition. For a spacecraft that can still manoeuvre, that is a design problem. For one that cannot, it is a retrieval problem.
An operator facing a disposal obligation for a satellite that has already failed has exactly two options: leave it and accept the consequences, or contract someone to go and get it. We exist for the second option.
Our approach
A single spectacular capture proves a mechanism works. A service proves the problem is solvable. We are building for the second case.
JUJUME designs, builds and commercially operates the spacecraft that do the removing. We keep the whole chain in house, from target characterisation through capture mechanism design to flight operations, because the interfaces between those disciplines are where removal missions are won or lost. A capture system is only as good as the relative navigation that puts it within reach, and the navigation is only as good as the understanding of how the target is tumbling.
Two commitments sit underneath the engineering. The first is that the service has to be cost-effective, because a removal capability nobody can afford to use removes nothing. The second is that it has to be environmentally conscious in the literal sense: our own missions must not add to the problem they exist to solve, which constrains how we approach, how we capture, and how both the target and our own hardware come down at the end.
From those commitments comes a simple statement of scope. We are building toward the ability to go after any object, in any orbit, at any time, because a service limited to convenient targets in convenient places leaves the actual risk in place.
01
Spent rocket bodies, fragmentation debris and non-operational satellites, cooperative or tumbling, and never designed to be caught. The capture system conforms to what is there rather than requiring a fixture that was never fitted.
02
From low Earth orbit through higher regimes, wherever the risk concentrates. The carrier and servicer pairing exists so that capture capability can be delivered to the orbits that need it rather than a single fixed shell.
03
Capture windows planned across the orbital calendar, so a removal can be scheduled against an operator's obligations or an agency's priorities instead of waiting for a favourable alignment.
Who we serve
Debris is indifferent to jurisdiction. Our customer base reflects that: commercial operators, government bodies and national space agencies, in more than one country.
01
Constellation owners carry a disposal obligation for every spacecraft they fly, and a failure rate that makes some of those obligations impossible to meet alone. We take the satellites that cannot take themselves down.
02
Policy has moved faster than capability. Bodies that have committed to sustainability targets need a way to convert those commitments into objects that are measurably no longer in orbit.
03
Agencies have the target lists, the orbital analysis and the mandate. What they often lack is an operator able to reach a specific object, hold onto it and bring it down on a defined schedule.
Discipline
Two things decide whether removal becomes an industry or stays a research topic: what it costs per object, and whether it makes the environment better on net.
We hold ourselves to both. Cost per removal is a design driver that shapes vehicle sizing, propellant budgets and how many objects a single campaign can address. Environmental consequence is the reason disposal is designed in at the start, for the captured object and for our own spacecraft, rather than being resolved after the interesting part of the mission is over.
Nobody solves this alone. Orbital sustainability is a shared problem with shared data, shared standards and shared consequences, and JUJUME participates in that effort as a working member rather than an observer.
We engage with the global space community through industry consortia, technical conferences and direct partnerships, and we serve clients across borders because the objects we are asked to remove were launched by many nations into orbits that all of them use. The practical value of that engagement is alignment: on which objects matter most, on what evidence of removal should look like, and on the standards a removal service ought to be held to.
Get in touch
Tell us about the object, the orbit and the obligation. We will tell you honestly whether and when we can help.