It will perform a number of rendezvous and capture scenarios before burning up. For this demonstration, Elsa-d will take a smaller spacecraft with it to act as a piece of space debris. In the next decade, more than 10,000 satellites are scheduled to launch, mostly from satellite internet providers such as SpaceX or OneWeb. The European Space Agency estimates 3,600 working satellites are in orbit, and more than 28,000 pieces of debris are being tracked by the US Space Surveillance Network. The removal of space debris is the key to space sustainability, which will ensure that new satellites can be operated without the risk of colliding with old ones. It will then push it into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it will burn up.
![clean space one clean space one](https://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/1202/cleanspaceone/thumb620/cleanspaceone_1.jpg)
Additionally, it makes every space-faring nation and society so vulnerable against harmful activities by an adversary. On the other hand, it is exactly this double purpose of a satellite that makes it so difficult for policy-makers to adopt useful regulations for outer space. The End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration mission (Elsa-d) is a small satellite designed to find, rendezvous and clamp on to an unwanted satellite. On the one hand, this can be of greatly beneficial use for politics. Elsa-d, the world’s first commercial mission to demonstrate a space debris removal system, is scheduled to launch at 06:07 GMT on 20 March from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.ĭeveloped by Astroscale, a Japanese-UK company, the mission will be operated from the UK’s in-orbit servicing control centre (IOCC) at Satellite Applications Catapult in Harwell, near Oxford.