宇宙ごみ除去ミッションと、ナンシー・グレース・ローマン宇宙望遠鏡の打ち上げ撮影

A mission to control space debris and capturing the launch of a new telescope. You're listening to Are We There Yet, the radio show exploring space exploration. Hi, I'm Brendan Fletcher. Space is getting crowded due, in part, to jump left in low-Earth orbit. To fix that, the company Astroscale is working on a spacecraft that will grab a piece of leftover rocket debris in space and remove it. Rather than just launching and leaving things in orbit, let's learn how to reuse it. Let's learn how to recycle it, refuel it, repair it. We'll speak with Astroscale's Chris Blackerby about the mission. Then, for our third installment of Space on Tap, a special Are We There Yet? live event series, we talked about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. We'll hear from Seminole State College's Derek Demeter about how he captured some images and videos of the launch and how Roman's data could change what we know about our universe. That's ahead on Are We There Yet? Before we jump into this show, have you checked out our other show, When We Find Them?

It's a new limited podcast series from Central Florida Public Media, and it's out now. What happens to society when scientists do discover signs of life in the universe? When We Find Them takes a deep dive into that day and what might come after. New episodes are out on Wednesdays. You can get it wherever you get this podcast. Space junk, or space debris, is primarily human-made objects that are left in low Earth orbit. NASA estimates there are millions of pieces of space debris flying around uncontrolled and fast, some reaching speeds of 18,000 miles per hour. There's a growing need to fix that, and that's where companies like Astroscale are trying to step in. The company is working on a mission that will grab a piece of junk, a rocket piece, and remove it safely from orbit. Astroscale has had some success already and will embark on a new mission to demonstrate its technology.

Here to talk about that mission is Astroscale's COO, Chris Blackerby. Chris, welcome to Are We There Yet? Brendan, thanks so much for having me. Good to be here. So, Chris, your company is looking to rendezvous with a non-cooperative rocket stage. Why is it non-cooperative? I love that adjective. Yeah, and I would correct one of your tenses there because we already have rendezvoused with that non-cooperative object. We haven't docked with it yet, but we have rendezvoused with it. So it is non-cooperative because it is non-communicative. It's a rocket that was launched back about 15 to 20 years ago from Japan, launched a JAXA Earth observation satellite, and it since then has been in orbit. So it is not active. It is not providing us with active telemetry or it has no fuel to maneuver. And so what JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, has contracted with us to do is go up and remove it. And so this mission that address J-2 that we've talked about is the second in a series of missions.

The first one called address J was launched in 2024, and it has gone up to within 15 meters of that upper stage rocket body. It has circled around it. It has taken high fidelity pictures of it and really understood the composition of the object in orbit. And that was the first stage so we could understand what it looks like. We could get a better feeling for is it rotating? Does it have been degradation of the object? And now our next mission is going to go up and grab onto it and bring it out of the way. You're flying at orbital speeds of, what, 17,000 miles per hour, and you have to do this very careful dance to get close to it. How tough was it to pull that off in 2024? It was challenging, Brendan. It was an effort that started when we were awarded the contract back in around 2020 by JAXA. And everything you say around the difficult technical aspects of this are spot on. This thing is going 17,000 miles an hour. It's going roughly four to five miles per second.

and we have to go up there, identify it, match its rotation, fly around it, all the while taking high-quality images of the object. It's something that's fairly unprecedented. We know we've had a long history in space of rendezvous and docking in orbit. Almost all the time that's been with two cooperative objects that are talking to each other, whether that was Apollo-Soyuz or Hubble Repair and others, all of that has been with two sides talking to each other, Here I am. Here I am. Where are you? OK, let's get closer. This was nothing like that. We had to go up and identify approach and rendezvous with something that wasn't talking to us. So I think fairly unprecedented, quite difficult. We learned a lot in the mission. And as no mission is without a problem, we had sometimes we had issues where we got close, switched to an automated rendezvous as we got really close. our software on the spacecraft recognized that there had to be some adjustment.

So we went around it and tried again. And so we had a very good fault detection and analysis capability on board. And so we were able to make sure we did this safely and approached it in the right way. I had to do the math for us here in the U.S., but 15 meters is 50 feet. I mean, that is really close that you're getting to this in the grand scheme of things, right? Really close. So, yeah, we did the full flyarounds from about 50 meters, so we got into 15 eventually. Are you hand-flying these, or are these spacecraft have a mind of their own, which I assume gives another level of complexity to this mission, right? It does. So the way we design the missions, we do all of the integration, all of the design of the missions, all of the testing. We do that in-house. Taking that forward, we do it up through operations. So we have a team in the UK and Japan for this mission that focused on the operations of the mission. So there were teams in our operation centers in Tokyo and outside of Oxford in the UK that were flying this mission.

Now, as we get closer to the client object, in this case, this upper stage rocket body, the time lapse in terms of giving instructions to our spacecraft and making sure it can safely approach this client, it's too tight. We couldn't be able to give some kind of instruction as it's getting to a couple hundred to 50 meters. And we're switching over to relative navigation from absolute navigation on the ground to relative navigation on the spacecraft. We're getting in closer. There's not enough time to be able to drive it, you know, hand drive it. So yeah we have autonomous capability And so once we get to within 50 meters we switching over to the onboard computers on the spacecraft You listening to Are We There Yet from Central Florida Public Media I Brendan Byrne We speaking with Astroscales COO Chris Blackerby about a mission to grab and remove space junk from orbit. Chris, I want to go on to the upcoming mission here now where you said you're going beyond rendezvous and going to dock with this. It's an uncooperative upper stage, meaning it's not talking to you, you're not able to control it. It also doesn't

have anything to grab onto, right? It wasn't designed for this. How are you going to grab this thing? In this case, with this upper stage, there's a payload adapter rig that's there on any upper stage rocket body. So we're going to go up to that rig. We're going to reach out some robotic arms and grab on to the edges to bring it down. We're building that robotic arm capture capability in-house as well. And this first mission that I was just talking about is the perfect precursor to allow us to be able to do that. We know exactly what this object looks like. We know exactly the state of that wing. We know that this object is not tumbling, which was actually somewhat of a surprise. You know, it's a spherical upper stage. But when we got there, we realized that it was basically pointing straight down to Earth. So we know now about how we will best approach it. So this first mission, Address J, gave us a lot of intelligence to be able to prepare for Address J2, where we're going to go up and grab onto it. We need to build out, for the future of what we're

trying to do in orbit, some more dockable capability on our spacecraft. And one of the ways we're doing that is we're working on building out docking plates, which is a small plate that has a ferromagnetic material on it. And if we put that on satellites before they launch, then we have an interface. We know what we're going for. It allows us to build out more at volume. It allows us to know exactly what we're going and not have to build the spoke capabilities for every mission that we're trying to go after, which is what we, we the collective, we in the space community have to do now. So if we can get to this point where docking plates as an interface are standard, then you can see how 5, 10, 15 years down the line, this is easier for us. We can make it more affordable for the customer. And that's something that we're really trying to build out to seed the market and to be more prepared for this in the future. That's interesting that you're building the hardware not only to capture something, but to put on, to be captured, right?

But it's going to be like, I use the example that it's like our, I'll say our grandparents. It was a couple generations ago. They had cars where seatbelts were an optional buy-in. Do you want a seatbelt? Okay, here's it. You have to pay an extra whatever hundred bucks to get that seatbelt in there. And we look at that now like, whoa, you guys, the seatbelts were an option. That should be pretty standard, right? I think our children, our grandchildren are going to look back at us and say, wait, you mean docking plates weren't standard? You had to like go to every single spacecraft to figure out how to grab onto it. I think we're going to we're at the cusp of making that change. And you get the great example of how space agencies are preparing. Companies are preparing, too. OneWeb, you know, has about 600 or so satellites in orbit. 85, 80 percent of those have one of the docking plates on there that we help design. So they're preparing themselves to be docked with. And we're actually building out a couple of missions that are going to go prove that technical capability on OneWeb satellites. Chris, that points to the bigger issue, right, of trying to mitigate or control space traffic and space debris.

Just how big of a problem is this and how are you able to chip away at that? We started in 2013 when our founder and CEO recognized that this idea of sustainability was going to be an issue. At that time, this is 13 years ago, roughly 1,000 active satellites in orbit. SpaceX hadn't gotten to the cadence that they're going at. Starlink hadn't launched. It was a much different time, but people were still talking about the eventual risk that would be there. Now look at us. I don't know what the latest numbers are. You can probably look it up, but 16,000 roughly satellites in LEO, still a very active geo environment. The contested nature of space is much more, we're all much more cognizant of that right now. So there are geopolitical risks. There are environmental risks. There are loads of new players that are continuing to launch into space. It's not a question of whether there's going to be another accident or another debris incident in orbit that puts all of the services that we get from space at risk. It's a question of when. And so I don't want to make it too alarmist because tomorrow, like tomorrow, is something going to happen? Probably not.

But the long tail risk is really high. And as we're talking about orbital data centers, as we're talking about commercial LEO destinations, as we're talking about tens of thousands of more satellites planned to be launched in the next 10 years, and we're talking about this $2 to $3 trillion orbital economy that's coming, that's not going to happen if we can't start controlling this. And that is an all-encompassing thing, Brendan. when it comes to debris removal, we're not going to be able to remove all the debris. We're not going to be able to completely buy down entirely the risk of a potential accident. That's not going to happen. But we better start preparing to reduce the likelihood of that risk. We better start preparing not only to remove the debris, but to learn how to service the spacecraft. What we talk about at Astroscale a lot is getting to a circular space economy, the same way we talk about doing that on Earth. So rather than just launching and leaving things in orbit, let's learn how to reuse it.

Let's learn how to recycle it, refuel it, repair it. How long until that mission is going to make contact with that spacecraft? And how do you measure success of this mission? So we're building the spacecraft right now in the clean room here in Tokyo that we have. This is one of our two big clean rooms. You have another one in the UK. We're about a year and a half to two years away from launching it. Obviously, success in our mind is docking. We're there to dock with that. And I don't want to play down or lower the bar on what success might look like. We're there to dock with an object in orbit. And this will be the first time we've done that with a free-flying object in orbit. We did have another mission earlier where we docked with an object that we brought to space. We have done it before. But we haven't done it with that free-floating object. So that is the key, and that's going to be the core technical capability to lead us to this larger business case that we're confident.

We been speaking with Astroscale CEO Chris Blackery about efforts to clean up space debris Chris thank you so much for joining us Hey Brendan thanks so much for having me It was a really nice conversation Still to come a conversation about Roman at Space on Tap a Central Florida Public Media special event series. That's ahead on Are We There Yet? You're listening to Are We There Yet? from Central Florida Public Media. I'm Brendan Byrne. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched back in August on a mission to study things like exoplanets, planets that orbit other stars, and dark matter and dark energy, invisible forces that shape the cosmos. The mission launched on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, blasting off from its destination about a million miles from Earth. For our third installment of Space on Tap, a special event series from Are We There Yet? we recorded a live taping speaking with Derek Demeter, the planetary director at the Seminole State College. He's also a freelance photographer for Central Florida Public Media.

This conversation was recorded live on Thursday, October 15th at Hourglass Brewing in Longwood, Florida. Here's that conversation now. Welcome to Space on Tap. And welcome back to Are We There Yet? Derek Demeter. Derek, welcome back to the show. I am excited about this. This is amazing. It's really cool, right? Look at how many people are in this place. All these space nerds here. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. On August 30th, NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Derek was out there recording some great video and capturing some great images. So before we get into our conversation, do you want to watch the video? Let's watch the video. What are we looking at, Derek? So this is a special type of video called a full-dome video for planetarians of the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket. as transporting the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope up into orbit

spurred around 7.15 a.m. So it was actually a really nice time. I was actually really nervous because I was worried about dew on the camera lens because this was a remote image or remote video. I couldn't go there and adjust my settings. I had to set it up and time it and rate all the timers and triggers and get the cameras started. but I was very happy and relieved to know that I was able to get it. What's really cool here is because of the angle of the sun, when it gets to a certain elevation, you're going to actually see the shadow created by the rocket as it goes into orbit. It's probably going to happen here in the next few moments, but you'll see that large beam of kind of like dark fan that kind of shoots down to the horizon, and that is an absolutely amazing I have, where's it at? I've got a laser pointer It should be coming up here right about now once we get there there we go you should start seeing it appear now

that it's high enough you can see the light of the sun hitting the actual gas or the exhaust of the rocket there it is, there's that beam that's the profile of the rocket itself because of that angle at which the sun is hitting the rocket it's truly magnificent that's super cool If we see it in the planetarium, you could... Yeah, so we have students that come out to the planetarium. We have the public, and they see this. It looks like you're literally standing there at Kennedy Space Center watching this rocket launch. Pretty cool. That's very neat. There it is. That's another one of Derek's photographs. So, Derek, you mentioned you weren't at the launch pad. Tell me how you actually captured that when you were miles away. Yeah, so nobody can be that close. I mean, we're literally probably maybe 3,000 or 4,000 feet from the actual launch pad there. Press site was where we normally watch these rocket launches out at Kennedy Space Center, and that's several miles away. And this is actually where this photo was taken from at the press site.

But in order to get that video, in the camera there's a built-in timer, and it will tell you, hey, when do you want this to start shooting? The nice part about Nancy Grace Roman was it was an instantaneous launch. So you knew it was happening. You knew it was happening. Yeah, some launches, they have a window, so it could launch in two hours. But this was an instantaneous. It's either no-go or go. That's it. So I knew that I could set the timer at that exact time, or I could set it about 10 minutes prior. My idea was is that if there was due, the camera heats up, takes 10 minutes of footage. That would be enough to clear off the lenses because I'm doing a 360 video. This is 360 degrees. You can't cover it. You can't protect it. It literally has to be exposed, the elements. And I was just hoping it would go. And all you could do at that point is you're watching this, hoping it went. You get back on the bus. They take you to the place where you pick up the camera. Of course, you're shaking because you're like, is this going to happen?

Is this going to happen? You look at it and you see it. And literally the person next to me was like, oh, he was happy because I was like, yes, I got it. Anyways, it was just an amazing feeling to be able to actually get that content because this is really the first ever this kind of footage to be used in a planetarium dome. That's so cool. That's so cool. I was glad to have you ever take these awesome photos that we used. Here's another great photo you captured. What are we looking at here? So here we have on the very bottom hand, we're just the main rocket, and then we have, of course, the two support booster rockets on the side, And the coolest part about these things is the fact that they are automated and they literally come back down, tumble down towards the earth, and then eventually land back down on the ground, which is total science fiction. If you were to tell my 10-year-old self, it would be like, ah, that's science fiction. Now, no, this is science fact. This is reality. And I had another video I did, which I didn't really bring for this one, but there were sonic booms that you can hear.

And it is very, very loud and very impressive. and to be able to see these things come back and literally almost like you took a footage and reversed it. You know, you've seen that where you reverse the footage. It looks like, you know, you're coming out of the water, but you're really not. That's how it felt. It felt like literally somebody just like the rocket launched and then you reverse the footage, right? It was kind of uncanny in a way. Yeah. To me, because they're almost 200 feet tall, right? I think they're like 190 feet tall. They're very large, yeah. But it's like it's a literal missile falling out of the sky. Yes. You're sitting there watching, and then all of a sudden those engines fire, and it's controlled. I mean, I'm obviously holding the camera, looking up, and this thing literally looks like it's just falling. It looks like I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is going to crash land on us. And then within a few minutes, all of a sudden the ignitions happen, and the force of that allows it to come down on the ground. It's truly amazing. Derek what is the most challenging part of capturing something like this So a lot of it is the fact that you have to deal with the fact that something is moving at incredible speed So you need to make sure that you have your focus good your stabilization Obviously you can hold it on a tripod but sometimes you just hand

this thing, following this thing. And we're dealing with near the early morning, this rocket, sometimes the focus gets confused because of the lack of difference in quality of the colors and things. So sometimes it will dance and you're like, oh, I want to get the shot. But one of the things that helps me as a rocket photographer is I do a lot of birding photography. You're using a motion stabilization. You're looking through your camera lens. You want to make sure you're getting the shot. A lot of times you're just holding the trigger down and just getting burst of images. So these images may seem like they're only two or three shots. I've gotten thousands of shots and I've looked at them. And as a photographer, you want to capture the moments that you want to show people. You know, video, you can show them a time lapse or a series of what's happening in time. Photography is about how do I capture a moment in one instantaneous time. And so that's why when you look at these, you go, okay, why is that one picture? Drives my wife nuts.

I take thousands of pictures, and I have two images that I've taken, you know, post or something. They're like, what do you think you took thousands of pictures? Because those two pictures to me convey the moment in time that I wanted to convey. You know, you've got people who upload all these images, and there's thousands of images. But to me, why did I choose that one? Because to me, that was that moment like this. This tells the story of coming back to Earth, and the profile of the rocket, you see the exhaust, all the things that you're conveying in your story here on the podcast. Yeah, so we're so glad to have you doing photography like that, bringing us into that moment, bringing us to the launch pad. But Derek, when we first met, you showed me some of your astrophotography, and I'm going to put up a photo you sent to me. That's incredible. What are we looking at? So we are looking at a very special place to meet. This happens to be Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, which is about two hours south of here. And it is the first ever dark sky preserve here in the state of Florida.

And I was one of the people that actually helped write that proposal. And a really good friend of mine, Jen Hughes, was a park ranger. She unfortunately passed away. And to me, when I see this picture, I see her spirit in this picture. But the most important thing is her and I work together to make this a place where people can go to escape the light pollution and be able to see this, the Milky Way, our home galaxy right here in Florida. And I think it's an amazing experience. And this is the 10th year anniversary this year for that. 10 years. That's awesome. And I think that was the most surprising thing when we first met is you told me that you could see the Milky Way galaxy here in Florida. And I said, no, you can't. There's actually plenty of places you can go in Florida to see the Milky Way. Unfortunately, we are losing that due to development. But there are ways to actually solve that. Light pollution can be solved by using the right type of lights that can prevent that light pollution. Is that why we see that kind of red down there?

Yeah, that's actually the bathroom right there. So there you go. If you need to use the bathroom, you know where it is. But that is actually, that's the only light they have there is that red light. So I love this picture. I love the fact that you've captured this of the Milky Way galaxy. Because I want to go back to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is supposed to be taking some incredible observations of the Milky Way galaxy. What is so important about the Roman Space Telescope? Imagine, you know, your phone has maybe 26, 50 megapixels. The main camera that Nancy Grace Roman has is 300 megapixels in resolution. That's wild. Very, very, I mean, just to give you an idea, if they printed one photo of that, it would cover an eight-story building. It's incredible, and you'd be able to see, you wouldn't see any pixelation in that print. It's absolutely amazing. Because of that resolution, we can look for things that are very tiny, that normally if you were to zoom in on, say, a Hubble Space Telescope image, it would be too pixelated because of the resolution.

One of the things that I'm excited about with Nancy Grace Roman is the fact that we are going to look for exoplanets, objects around our neighborhood here in the Milky Way, for worlds with resolution as small as the moon in terms of diameter. What's an exoplanet? Let's talk about that. Yes, great question. So an exoplanet is basically a planet that orbits around another star. Anything outside of our solar system, any planet that we find outside of our solar system is considered an exoplanet. And that is what I'm mostly excited about, the fact that Nancy Grace is going to be able to look for those potential worlds that could be habitable and that could be places that we could one day visit. What might we find? I say we like I'm looking for this data. What might we find as humanity within that data, Derek? And why are you so excited for that stuff to come back? Well, again, as I said, so there's several missions for Nancy Grace. One was the exoplanets that I mentioned earlier. The other one is actually watching the changes in the universe's expansion from the beginning of the origins of the universe.

And by looking at those changes, we can learn the profile at which the universe is evolving over time. And that's still a big mystery in our understanding of the cosmos. but going back to the exoplanet thing we still don't have the 100 way of figuring out whether or not there are truly earth-like worlds that are habitable that have possible alien life on them that possibly could be habitable for us this allows us to really pinpoint down what is feasible when we want to leave our planet or better yet figure out is there life elsewhere in the universe please Derek Demeter, the planetary director at the Seminole State College, and our photographer, please get up for Derek. So thank you very much, Derek. That's going to do it for this week's show. If you're interested in our search for life in the universe, be sure to check out our newest podcast, When We Find Them, a limited series that explores the search for life and what happens when we find it.

Get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are out on Wednesdays. Stay connected with this show. Be sure to follow Are We There Yet? on social media. You can find us on Instagram and Facebook. We're at A-W-T-Y space. And if you've got an idea for a future episode of this show, or you want to join us as a guest, reach out to us. Our email is rvthereyet at cfpublic.org. Rv There Yet is a production of Central Florida Public Media. Our producer is Marion Summerall. Engineering assistance this week from T.J. Barnes. Editorial guidance from Latoya Dennis. Support for Rv There Yet comes from our listeners. Until next time, I'm Brendan Byrne. Thanks for listening. you