Main Engine Cut Off - T+139: RemoveDEBRIS with Richard Duke

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

Richard Duke from the Surrey Space Center joins me to talk about their RemoveDEBRIS mission, which launched last year and carried out 4 different tests focused on space debris removal and management.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 308 other supporters.Surrey Space Centre | University of SurreyRemoveDEBRIS | University of SurreyRemdeb Mission Highlights - YouTubeRemoveDebris Mission - YouTubeSurrey Nanosats SSC Mission Delivery Team - YouTubeLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo as always, and we've got the second episode that is from the fallout of IAC I will say. I met a ton of people at IAC as I've talked about previously, and we've got a bunch of interviews between now and probably the end of the year, even longer than that. I've still got a bunch to schedule. But the second one up here is with Richard Duke from the Surrey Space Centre. When I was on the showroom floor at IAC, I went over to the Surrey booth because they are the crew behind the Remove Debris mission. You may remember Remove Debris because we've tracked it here on Main Engine Cutoff while it was happening, and they released a ton of really interesting videos.

This was a satellite that was deployed from the ISS thanks to SpaceX and NanoRacks and NASA, and it went on to demonstrate a couple of different technologies for removing and managing space debris in the future. The two most famous ones were the videos that went around of them shooting a harpoon into a target and then capturing a CubeSat with a net, you know, showing examples of how they might capture debris in the future. So we're going to be talking with Richard Duke from the Surrey Space Center today about all things about that mission, from how it started, to how it all went, to how it was developed, to how it finished, everything in between,

including how these things may be used on future missions, what may be coming in Remove Debris 2, and where things go from here in a very popular topic that is space debris and the management of it. So I'm really excited to have him on the show. So with that, let's get into the conversation. Richard, thank you so much for joining me on Main Engine Cutoff. Welcome to the show. It's nice to be here. Thank you. So we met a couple of weeks back at IAC. I wandered over to the booth and we were looking at some footage of the Remove Debris mission. And I was like, man, I really want to talk about this more because I feel like there hasn't been enough talk about this in the last year. So thank you so much again for being willing to do this.

It's a mission that I know a lot of people are interested in and loved watching the footage of, so I can't wait to hear a lot about it. So before we talk about the mission itself, I'd love to hear about your role on the mission and what you do at Surrey day to day. Yeah, so my role is a spacecraft operations manager, and basically I look after the spacecraft that the University of Surrey operates. We're quite unique at the university in that we have our own capability in the university to build, fly and test our satellites. But we also link in as with Remove Debris to Surrey Satellite Technology and also Airbus to come together to do bigger missions like Remove Debris. So the Remove Debris mission, it was launched in 2018 in April, I believe, deployed in June from the ISS, which we'll talk about more in a second. But

what was the development timeline like to get to the launch pad? Yeah, so the actual, I mean, coming from the university side of things, we see the mission right from the start when you're actually looking at the first concepts and the design of, you know, how could you remove space to be you know years before you actually even start thinking about designing a mission so we've been working on this type of projects for for a decade or more now but the actual mission itself started about eight years ago when we identified you know these are the the best ways to potentially get space debris.

And so we started designing a mission with our colleagues. And as you say, we had about three years of build time, and then it launched a year before last. So there was four missions that were carried out as part of the spacecraft itself. There was the vision-based test that you did to be able to see debris. And then you did the very famous at this point, the harpoon and the net tests, which are their incredible videos out there. And then the drag sail test. I would love to hear a little bit about each of those, just some background in case people haven't seen those

videos or read up on this. And are there any that didn't make the cut for the mission? Was for your target or did you have others in mind that just didn't fit on the satellite or timeline wise didn't make it yeah so the thing with a mission like this where we're trying to get space debris is actually just to design a mission and do it all in one is is almost impossible there's so much technology that we have to develop to get to that end result, and it just isn't there yet. So you've always got things like rendezvous and docking, you've got proximity operations, you then got to have sensors that spot space debris

or satellites, and then you've got to work out how to capture the satellites, and then also how to dispose of them. So there's an awful lot of things that we were looking at. Yeah. He didn't really pick off an easy chunk of work there. Yeah. Yeah.

And we started to say, well, what are the ones that, you know, really, really needs sort of this, this university input to really bring it up to a level where you could start to prove it for a, for a mission that can do the whole thing. So as I say we identified four areas and the really important thing for this mission again was not to demonstrate the full chain but was to conduct a series of controlled tests for each different type of technology. So we wanted to make sure that if we were having to capture a satellite we we didn't rely on,

say, a vision-based navigation system to detect it first, because we were also developing that technology and demonstrating that. So we wanted to make sure that all of the different demonstrations were quite separate so we could sort of very quite scientifically test each one out individually. So the vision one, I'm curious to hear about that. The harpoon and the net, I think we can tell from the video what the intent there was. In both cases, there are different ways to capture debris. The vision one, I'd love to hear more about the technical side of that. Which pieces of that were kind of the new tech you were testing and

how did that go overall? Yeah, the vision-based navigation one for us was actually one of the really important ones. A lot of people look at the harpoon and net as the bigger ones, but from an engineering point, the vision-based navigation was a really key one, because before you can use the net or the harpoon really, you've got to be able to see where the target is and work out where to where to fire everything so the uh the boomerang based navigation system it was provided to us from airbus it's one of the systems they've been working on for quite a while now uh but they really needed a proper testing space with it and lidars are different from normal cameras in that they can also detect how far away an object

is so they can not only just get a picture of it and also the angle to where the object is but they can also measure the distance as well but the problem is because it's a camera it's quite difficult to do when you're up in space if you're against just blackness that's actually relatively easy but of course half the time if you're in low-earth orbit you've got the earth which is this huge bright glowing object straight behind it so you've got to be really careful you've got to really carefully design your system so it can still work in that scenario so we were very much taking the prototype and then demonstrating it and so they could get results see what they could refine further for the missions

that hopefully will actually use it as a core part of their system. So for that mission what we did for that experiment what we did is we had to have a test bit of space debris so we actually use one of our cube stats that we built at the university here so the thing with cube stats is they're nice and cheap so you can actually use them not only to run you know small emissions but you can use them as part and large emissions for demonstration so we actually released one of our cube stats from the the remove debris platform and then we use the camera to basically look at this CubeSat now the CubeSat itself it might be small but it was just packed full of sensors so we have attitude sensors we also have things like GPS

sensors and then we had an inter-satellite link that could beam all of that data back to the mothership and so remove debris the mothership not only knew where the satellite is, but it's also getting the data from the camera. And then we can look at that on the ground and combine the two and say, OK, if the camera is saying it's 30 meters away, was that actually really where it was? So again, it's these very controlled conditions where we have ground truth. We know exactly what's happening.

And then we test the camera and see if it's actually reporting the correct distances. And then on the harpoon and the net side, the harpoon was actually, I don't know, this is a random question, but in the video of the harpoon, it kind of blasts the target off of the satellite. Was that more powerful than was expected, or did you expect that to break away, just given the physics at play there? There was a very, very good chance that it would break away. We were trying to mitigate as much as possible.

But the reason why that was is we put the target out on a carbon fiber boom and we can't afford a lot of weight and it's got to be an extendable boom as well because we couldn't afford the uh the the volume on the launch vehicle because if you extend the boom a meter away it's going to double triple your launch costs uh so we had to have this very very lightweight boom made by oxford space systems we in fact demonstrated the first uh the boom first on one of our other CubeSat missions actually a year before so we actually helped Oxford demonstrate this new technology and then we actually used it as part of the mission on the removed debris. So yes we're deploying this very light boom out so we always

knew there'd be a potential of it breaking off. But the real key thing to us was to make sure the harpoon hits the target, because it's quite a special harpoon. So it's got barbs at the end. So if it goes through the target, it actually locks onto the target. So as long as that happens, then we wouldn't have any issue with space debris where the actual target would fly away right yeah yeah at least you're capturing it you're actually it's almost a better proof of the harpoon at that point uh if it were to break away you know it's not completely uh as planned but it was almost perfect how uh the actual target rotated because it actually gave us a really good view of not just

the impact site but actually then as it rotated around, you could actually see it sort of as a cross section. So we got an awful lot of data there about how actually the harpoon had hit and gone through the target. Yeah, that's pretty cool. For the results, it was almost perfect as a test. So the harpoon and the net, did those both kind of go the way that you expected them to? There's a lot of, as we were talking about the harpoon, there's a lot of dynamics there, and even more so with the net, making sure that it

stays wide and then captures the debris. Did both of those go as you expected? And I wonder if you could talk about the differences between them in terms of what they may be used for in the future. Yeah, no, I mean, both experiments went far better than we could have hoped, actually. The harpoon is actually a very difficult type of dynamics to work with because obviously we've not got any air up there, so all the normal aerodynamics don't apply. So when you fire the harpoon, actually the biggest driver on how it flies is actually the tether behind it

because it pulls out this tether. So actually as this tether comes out, that plays a lot of the dynamics of the boom and actually trying to make sure that the harpoon hits the target straight on to go through is extremely difficult. And if you've seen the videos and that, we got almost dead center on it which was absolutely fantastic and the the net itself I mean I think we always thought the net is the the harder one to do but that worked almost perfectly again we learnt a lot about how much energy you need for the net to come out

was that there's been lots of analysis done on that on that now which will be really useful for future missions and although the the target was a bit off to the side it was still well within the capture zone so we were extremely pleased at both of them I mean everything was a one-shot so if anything gone wrong yeah that would have been the end of that would have been the end of the experiment. Like, like a lot of space in the past, every single thing had to go absolutely right to get the to get the final results. And so actually getting a final result where both worked was absolutely incredible.

And then for for the way that you were approaching those two missions, was there a particular type of debris that you had in mind with each of those? Is there different kinds of targeting? Obviously, it's nets and harpoons that work for different kinds of targets. Were any of those considerations in how you went about the mission, thinking about future uses of those two tools? Yeah, so the reason why we looked at these two tools, well we're really looking from this mission about how to capture uncooperative satellites. So it's basically space debris that does not hold its attitude. So hopefully in the future if you need to get some satellites down, hopefully they might

be able to hold their own attitude and you can go in with more of a standard docking system. able to hold their own attitude and you can go in with more of a standard docking system but we're really looking at what happens if the satellite has died or you know there's other types of space debris so it's completely uncooperative so you need to make sure you've got a large margin for error for being able to be able to use these systems now the nice thing with things like the net is actually because that just envelopes the entire thing you don't need to know a lot about the underlying construction of the satellite with the harpoon you do because obviously if you're harpooning

something it's going to go through and you want to know what it's going to hit behind where it hits so there's sort of two different technologies the harpoon in something, it's going to go through and you want to know what it's going to hit behind where it hits. So there's sort of two different technologies. The harpoon is more based on something where you know the structure of the satellite a lot more and the net has basically a larger margin for error because it just goes around and grabs it. When we started out out the net was probably the more risky one but actually that's really proved to work very very

nicely and I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of the missions we're doing I mean obviously space debris has now become quite a big topic with all the constellations coming up so that you know the impacts from space debris are going to be a lot more, but also the chances for creating space debris is going up. But a lot of the work we're doing, because it's funded by the European Commission, is actually looking at how to get satellites such as MVSAT. So MVSAT is a large European satellite that, after a very long and successful mission, satellite that after a very long and successful mission, they lost contact with it. And this is a very large double-decker size bus satellite. And so we're really trying to look at how you can use

techniques to go after that type of debris. So I'm curious about the interplay between the vision-based navigation and the targeting systems that you're working on there. You were talking about how you might be approaching a satellite that's lost attitude control. Is there something that you kind of see the convergence of those two technologies where you've got vision-based navigation to assess the spin and the dynamics of the target, and then you would use the others to uh specifically target a spot on the target i'm using the word target like 18 times here but uh you know you you would use the vision base to pick out the right spot to hit the target with the harpoon or the net is that something that uh you kind of had in the initial test or is that something that you could be working towards in the future yeah so if you're going to do this mission as a real mission, you're going to have to be able to find the target, work out what it's doing, and then target it and capture it.

So you're going to need both of those technologies. Now the reason why we separated them is we didn't want to do one experiment, and if that didn't work quite well, prec running the the second one so we wanted to make sure we kept them quite separately but you'd have to have both if you wanted to do a full mission and that's why both are very important uh because one basically tells the other one where to where to go yeah and that do you think that would be something where um when you when you were if you were hypothetically going to, let's just use Envisat as the example. Um, you know, before launch, do you think that you would have a really good assessment of where you want to hit Envisat to capture it? Or do you think that

you would be kind of deciding that on the fly based on what you're getting from the vision system? So, so in general, it's probably easier to get a lot more information on the ground to get a good idea information on the ground to get a good idea on where you're going to capture this before you actually go up but there is some difficulty with that because with say you've got some debris that's been a result of a collision then you actually won't have drawings and diagrams on the ground to tell you what the state of that is so that's also where rendezvous and then inspection and vision-based navigation and capture comes into its own.

And also for a lot of old spacecraft, actually a lot of the documents have been lost. So for the very old ones, we've only got a certain amount of information. So again, that's where vision-based navigation comes in very well. The nice thing with the vision-based LIDAR system as well, it's not just for looking at space debris that that technology is useful. It's also used if you're rendezvousing and docking with working spacecraft. If you're inspecting spacecraft, there's a whole range of technologies that

are benefited by that test. Yeah, absolutely. So those were kind of the headliners of the mission. You did have that one drag sail at the end. I see that kind of different because the harpoon in the net, you're reacting to a system that's already in play. Drag sail is something that you would plan before, and you would attach that to your satellite going up. So I see them as different things,

but is there any particular things that you learned from that mission? Yeah, no, you are quite right. It's a very different type of system. And the main reason why we included the drag sail on was to actually be another test for our systems at Surrey. So the University of Surrey has put an awful lot of work into drag sail technology. So University of Surrey has put an awful lot of work into drag sail technology. And we actually had the first European sail about three years ago now, where we actually demonstrated a sail that similar went on a move debris on a CubeSat. Again, we tried to try to test everything on CubeSats first before we put them on the main systems. And that was hugely successful.

So instead of the CubeSat taking 30 years to come down, it came down in about three months. So that really demonstrates that technology works. We were trying to fly another one on remove debris. Unfortunately, we actually had an issue with the one on remove debris, which was quite disappointing. But we've also been developing since then,

the remove debris one was quite an early technology. And we've flown a few others since then. And most recently on the SSOA mission from Spaceflight in America, which took off on the SpaceX mission. And we actually flew two sails on there. And they seem to be working perfectly. sails on there and uh there they seem to be working perfectly so uh although we're slightly disappointed that remove debris what didn't come on that was you you have to assume a few failures as you try and develop the technology before it becomes mature and uh and reliable and so that's where we are now uh and we've now had three successful ones out of four so that did that

affect the end of the mission at all? I know I was reading the material again on the website, and the timeline was 1.5 years from the start of the mission to the end of it. So did that affect the timeline for that at all? Or was that assuming that the drag sail didn't have an impact? No, so the deorbit time, the mission is now effectively finished now. We've completed everything. The deorbit time, the mission is now effectively finished now, we've completed everything. The deorbit time is going to be a little bit more, so obviously we're going to have to let it naturally decay.

But we always design these missions assuming these very new types of technology might not work. So one of the reasons why we did that, one of, uh, uh, one of the reasons to mitigate that we actually launched from the ISS. So we were already at quite a low altitude in case it didn't work. So instead of it being, you know, hundreds of years to, to deorbit, actually we're in a very low orbit and we'll deorbit in a year or so anyway. So it'd be very nice if the test worked, but if it didn't, we always knew we'd come down pretty quickly. Yeah, and the ISS is pretty strict on that anyway, given their

deployments. I know we've had nanoracks on the show, which we'll talk about in a second, and we've talked before about the way that they have to deploy, the attitudes they have to deploy at to make sure that the satellites come down and don't pose an impact to the ISS. No, you're absolutely right. We'll come on in a sec to our deployment from the ISS,

but we also had to take that into consideration with our experiments as well, because both the VBN experiments and the NET experiment had a deployable CubeSat. So actually we're deploying these CubeSats and we have to take exactly the same things into consideration because the nature of orbital dynamics, if you just fire a CubeStat out in a certain direction, there's a chance it can come back around on the next pass and actually hit your own spacecraft. So we had to spend a lot of time making sure things like that wouldn't happen to make sure that we didn't create any more debris. This is like the Russian nesting doll of spacecraft here. You've got a lot going on. So let's get into that.

You chose an interesting strategy for launch. You went via the ISS rather than dedicated launch or even a launch vehicle-based rideshare. So you were on CRS-14 with SpaceX, and you worked with NanoRacks to deploy it from their larger satellite deployer. And I think you might still hold the record for largest satellite deployed by the ISS. Is that correct? Yeah, I think the record still stands and by quite a margin as well. So we were really the first

large-scale satellite to launch from the ISS. And we're in fact that large that we actually designed the satellite to fit exactly to the Japanese airlock so in terms of volume you probably can't deploy anything bigger at the moment and because of the size as well where normally they might use the Gemarm to do the deployments they actually had to use Canadarm2 for ourselves. So that was quite nice being seen, you know, the very famous Canadarm2 deploying one of our spacecrafts, which was absolutely fantastic to watch. The guys at NanoRacks, SpaceX for the CRS launch, and then the help from NASA

as well. And the astronauts was just incredible. How did you end up choosing that route for launch? Was that something that you realized? I mean, you said you designed the spacecraft to fit precisely, so that had to be a pretty early decision when the mission was in development. Well, originally, we weren't going to fly with the ISS, actually. We were looking at other options. But then when we started to look at the height that we wanted to fly to, and also then cost implications and other factors, then the ISS started to look very beneficial. Now, the reason why we'd not normally choose something like the ISS is because, of course, the actual launch of a spacecraft that big

hadn't been done before, so that's a challenge in itself. And especially because we have to there's a lot more considerations for the ISS than you would have on other rockets so a big one is affected a human rate in your spacecraft so when you're on a normal rocket they're not too you know they're very worried about the rocket itself but they're not too worried about the the spacecraft when it's in orbit but of course when ours is in orbit we actually have astronauts that working it. And the last thing you want to do is, you know, have an astronaut have a cut on a sharp edge or have some filings get into their eyes or

anything like that. So we had to do an awful lot of work to get on the ISS, working with the NASA safety panel to make sure it was safe. I can't imagine that they were thrilled when you told them you were going to have a deployable harpoon going inside the space station. Yeah, I wasn't in that meeting, I have to admit, although I wish I had been. I'm sure there'd have been a few raised eyebrows. I'm sure there's probably a few more raised eyebrows when they ask for the purpose and you go, it's designed specifically to go through the side of spacecraft. That's probably, uh, that's probably raised a few more. Uh, but actually that wasn't a big safety concern.

Uh, something like that. You can have, you know, three, four different lockouts if you want. There's that's actually one of the easier things to, uh, to protect against the, the harder things actually are things like just the batteries. So actually the battery on the spacecraft is quite a large battery and trying to make sure that that could go onto the spacecraft, you know, nice and reliably not cause any danger is actually really really difficult. If you've seen lithium-ion batteries on aircraft,

what they can do to aircraft and that. And we actually had a very, very big one. So we actually learned a lot in how to make sure spacecraft are successful. Sorry, just quickly. Can you hear that in the background? Cause I got lots of smoke. Yeah, I can hear that.

I'll just turn it down one second. No, no problem. Sorry, it was just carrier from one of our spacecraft coming over. Interrupted podcast by a spacecraft. It's actually perfect. Yeah, well, if it podcasts about space, yeah, this is actually LSAT-1N, one of our missions with Algeria that's coming over. I'm keeping this in now because this is content right here.

This is future-looking content. Yeah, so this is quite a nice mission. It was a joint UK and Algeria mission. And it was all again, technology demonstrators. And one of the technologies we demonstrated on this mission was actually this carbon fiber boom that we then used on remove debris. So look at that. Yeah, so it's sort of it's sort of nicely ties in yeah yeah i mean it's one of the really nice things about being at the university and the capability that we have is that we can take things from theory demonstrate them and then take them straight through to commercial extremely quickly so you know one year with one year we fly in the first demonstration of a technology

like the boom and then the next year we're flying it as sort of a core bit of the the spacecraft to do other things so it's one of the really nice things we've been able to do here so that's a good transition into uh sort of the future considerations of what you flew on remove debris um you've now tested a harpoon and a net and this vision-based navigation and everything else that went into this mission. How do you see those coming into play for something like capturing Envisat, bringing that down? Are there particular missions that maybe you have discussions about going on already or things that you have in mind that these might be useful on in the near future? Yeah, there's quite a few missions that are being developed at the moment that take

especially the net and the harpoon and the VBN into consideration. So most of this is done by our partners at Airbus. So Airbus, quite a few different divisions of Airbus, actually provided the experiments to us and then we effectively helped them test that we tested it with remove debris and provided all the targets and especially from their point of view they're now looking at scaling up those technologies to actually work with with bigger systems so they've got quite a few different missions that they're looking at now and hopefully in the future in the near future hopefully we'll be looking at some some And hopefully in the future, in the near future, hopefully, we'll be looking at some commercial missions effectively and commercial technology that can go and do this on a regular

basis. Do you think that those will start with large satellites like Envisat? Or do you think that they will start small scale and grow up? I'm not sure, you know, as somebody from the outside, I'm not sure which would be better because you've got a bigger target on one end, but you've got more mass to deal with as well. So I'm not sure if you've got any thoughts on how that might shake out. That's an interesting one. I've not really been asked that one before, so it's a very, very good question. I think from an overall safety point of view, the consensus now is that you have to go after the large objects

because the large objects will tend to stay up there for for longer because the way orbital dynamics works but also we from a theoretically we need to bring out as much mass as possible so it's not necessarily the number of objects it's just the more mass you can bring out the better not because there's a bigger risk of that being hit but actually because if it does get hit that one big bit of mass could then create you know tens of thousands of other bits of debris and that's actually the real danger from our side so you tend to find a lot of especially things like the CubeSats and that at low altitudes

they'll come down pretty quickly without any help. But actually going up to get some of the really big spacecraft that are at risk of being hit by debris themselves, that's actually, from an overall safety point of view, that's really what needs to happen first. what needs to happen first. However, realistically, how this will go, as it always goes, is which is the most commercially viable route. And so I think what you'll probably see, we might see one or two big missions for the big spacecraft,

but I think what we'll start to see very soon is missions going after constellations. So if you're operating a constellation of a thousand spacecraft and you lose a couple and they then become space debris, actually it's beneficial to yourself to go and get that space debris out of the way because it's going to impact your operations potentially. So I think what you're going to see is it's going to be initially very targeted at certain areas and certain orbits where the risk is higher to commercially sensitive operations. That's an interesting way to look at it, because I think a lot of times when people talk about the constellations, there's a lot of

people just saying, oh, they're just going to create a bunch of space debris. But the way you just phrased that, the biggest risk is themselves. They're having a piece of debris in their orbital regime. It's a huge risk to their own assets. And that's something that I don't hear a lot of people phrase that that well. So that's a really good take that I'm quite happy to hear from somebody that's working on this kind of stuff. And exactly. And also, the insurance costs are going to skyrocket as well. Yeah, right. The liability there of having that floating around. Yeah. So actually, if suddenly your insurance is larger than the cost of actually going and clearing an old satellite of yours up, then actually that's going to start to be commercially

viable. So is there anything that you think that you need to fly before you're ready to do one of those missions? Is there going to be removed debris too? And if so, what would be the technologies that you would fly on that sort of mission? Yeah, so at the university, we're now working on what are the real key technologies that need to be approved for the next missions. Some of the technologies are actually being looked at by commercial companies now. So we've got companies in the UK in fact which are actually looking especially to do like the rendezvous and docking in the inspection so that's sort of the next missions that will come out and as soon as you've got the rendezvous and docking inspection and you can tie that up with some of the

technologies to actually capture it then you've got your full mission so we really see remove debris as part of the technologies to enable the full missions in the future. And so really the rendezvous and docking is the next steps. And then we'll be looking at, okay, what's the next major leap for space technology after that? Yeah, the one I'm curious about is what you do after you've captured the target. Is there propulsion technology you need to work on? Is there,

you know, any thoughts in that department of how you would bring that down from its altitude to a deorbit? Yeah, the normal thought is that you just would use propulsion. That's, if you've got a nice working spacecraft, that's by far the easiest way to orbit something safely and very quickly. And it also means you can do a targeted reentry then. So you can actually bring it down and roughly know whereabouts, hopefully over an ocean, it's going to reenter. Yeah, no Skylab incidents on this one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, we've started to learn a lot more about reentry now. So although it's still quite a difficult thing to predict, we can get a lot closer now. In fact, that's one of the things that we started to do with some of the sail missions, because the sails that we design, they're effectively uncontrolled. So the attitude is controlled, but we can't really really tell it when where exactly it's going to come down but actually we started a lot about

the atmosphere there and how that affects the reentry dynamics and from our point of view that's actually where what we're working on in the future as well is sale technology so drag technology. And the benefit that this has is it does allow a controlled descent with effectively an uncooperative spacecraft. So if you don't have your spacecraft with attitude control, it's actually, you can't use propulsion very easily because there's an equal chance of reentering

as there is to actually pushing yourself into a higher orbit. The benefit with the sail technology, because it just increases your surface area, is that when you deploy your sail, it will always come down faster. Awesome. Well, Richard, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. Is there anywhere that you'd like to point everyone listening

to follow along with what you're working on in the future? So obviously our website at the University of Surrey, the Surrey Space Centre. I'd always advise people give that a look. We also put some of our mission videos on a YouTube channel called Surrey Nanosats. So if you go to there, you'll see some of our other videos. And also there's the mission highlights video there as well. And I mean, this really was one of the jewels for this mission, was the amount of high quality video that we got.

Not only because we launched from the space station, where of course NASA provided some incredible footage for us. I mean, right from the astronauts unpacking and preparing the spacecraft through to the release of the spacecraft and actually passing over our ground station in Guildford as well. So we actually got a video of our spacecraft from above. That's cool. I don't know if anybody's done that before, but it must be, it must be quite rare.

But we also had, because we have the VBN camera, we also had really high quality footage on the spacecraft as well for the experiments. So it was really one of the first missions that we've had that just had really high quality footage for a lot of it. So that's our mission highlights video on the Surrey Nanosats channel. Yeah, and I'll put a link in the show notes because everyone needs to watch that. That's what you and I watched together at IEC, and I just stood there for a couple of minutes and watching because I'd seen the clips before that had made the rounds, but this was

a lot more footage than I had seen previously, so definitely worth the five minutes that it is. Yeah, I think there's even a, like, I'll have to check, but I think there's even a 25-minute 4K quality video from NASA of the debris actually on there. I'm sorry, of the release on there, which is pretty special as well.

Yeah, I got to check that one out. Thank you so much, Richard, for coming on. It was a pleasure talking with you and I hope that we will talk again soon when you're bringing down debris. Yeah, not a problem. Thanks very much and pleasure to be on the show. All right, well, that will do it for us today. Thank you again to Richard for coming on the show for talking about Remove Debris. It's an awesome mission that I'm very excited to have had that conversation about.

I love learning about that kind of stuff from people that are actually flying these missions. So look forward to that more in the future as we've talked to everyone else that I met at IAC. We've got a lot of episodes left that have come from that week. So that was a hugely pivotal week for Miko. And it's only thanks to everyone who supports the show over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. This is entirely listener funded. So if you like what I'm doing, if you like these interviews, if you like the fact that this all came out of IAC, you made it happen. Head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 346 of you supporting the show,

including 38 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. You made this kind of stuff possible. I could not do it without you. And with that, we are done here for the day. Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for your support as always. You can find the show notes for this over at mainenginecutoff.com. Check out the links there. There's the videos from Remove Debris, as well as the blog where I'm posting links to stuff that I'm reading during the week.

So if you like the show, check it out. And until next week, thank you all for listening. I'll talk to you soon.