One of my favorite things about venture capital is getting early, inside access to some of the big problems that will be addressed (if not entirely solved) over the next decade.
I’ll be periodically sharing some of these here with the hopes you find them as interesting as I do.
When I think of Low Earth Orbit (the part where earth’s atmosphere ends and “space” begins), I imagine a calm and serene horizon, where you could float peacefully and take in the scenic view.
Maybe I get these ideas from space movies like Interstellar or Ad Astra. But don’t you also imagine it in the same way?
The reality is not so peaceful — there are millions of pieces of debris orbiting around the earth at 15,700 MPH, and they have been accumulating exponentially.
This worrisome space junk situation has been dubbed the “Kessler Syndrome”, and, left unaddressed, can halt space exploration for decades, since collision with this debris would eventually become unavoidable.
We get a small taste of this chaos in the movie, Gravity, however imagine the real situation being orders of magnitude worse than George Clooney and Sandra Bullock were dealing with. . .
How do we solve this problem?
We need better imaging to identify the location of these objects because 97% of space debris is undetected. This need is referred to as space situational awareness.
Why is it the case that we miss nearly all the flying debris? It’s because at the moment, we attempt to track these things with low resolution, on-ground radars, which means anything smaller than a softball will essentially go unnoticed.
We need to remove many of these objects from orbit, and this has led to an emerging active debris removal market.
In pursuing an investment opportunity, I recently spoke with the CEO of a startup solving this problem, which I’ll refer to as Project T.
The company is launching satellites with optical sensors (i.e. cameras) that will capture the locations of the all flying objects in Low Earth Orbit, encode them into data, and sell this data to other space companies (use cases include navigational software, space insurance, maintenance of other satellites, etc.).
Project T will also involve active debris removal, where its satellites will locate and extract problematic space junk from orbit, directly reducing the potential for spacecraft-destroying collisions.
As the company grows in scale, its ultimate endgame is in asteroid mining — Asteroids are insanely dense with valuable metals, such that the market is measured in the QUINTILLIONS of dollars. How is this possible?
According to scientists, the metals that are intrinsic to earth have mostly melted away towards the earth’s core, leaving them inaccessible to us. Most of the profitable metals we mine actually originated from asteroids that once crashed onto the earth’s crust. With new space technology, we’ll be able to go directly to the real source of iron, nickel, platinum, gold, etc. and this could end up being the dominant commercial activity for humanity.
There’s a new kind of space race and it’s exciting to meet the founders who are at the helm. Not knowing much about the sector, I enjoyed learning about developing industries around space debris and asteroid mining.
If you’re interested in uncovering more about the Project T opportunity, feel free to reach out to me. The company is wrapping up its seed round soon and you can participate in it through an angel syndicate (these syndicates allow you to make a small investment that can be pooled in with that of others).