Sustainability has become a goal not only on Earth, but also in space, with increased awareness of our responsibility to clean up after ourselves in the solar system too. If ignored, we’ll leave future generations with thousands of obsolete satellites and other space debris orbiting Earth, posing a direct danger to any new satellites or missions they may want to launch.
While the European space industry has been largely grounded since 2022, when a technical issue forced its next-gen Vega-C rocket to be painstakingly redesigned, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has led the rest of the world with hundreds of launches.
Swiss entrepreneur and ClearSpace founder Luc Piguet is working to regain Europe’s space leadership, albeit from an environmental angle. Piguet believes that as space activity accelerates, the urgency to address debris removal must also accelerate to prevent entire orbital regions from becoming unusable due to the risk of collisions.
At its peak, this orbital danger is known as the Kessler syndrome, in which space debris collisions would cascade and increase the likelihood of further crashes. This is a genuine possibility. “Without proper management,” Piguet said, “the debris will only multiply, creating a feedback loop where the risk of collision increases exponentially.”
The fact that this scenario was theorized in the 1970s by two NASA scientists shows that the U.S. space agency is highly aware of the risks of space pollution, but it isn’t the only one: The European Space Agency (ESA) will follow a ‘Zero Debris approach’ to significantly limit the production of debris in Earth and Lunar orbits by 2030 for all future missions and activities.
That’s where ClearSpace comes in. With support from ESA’s Switzerland-based business incubation center, the company founded in 2018 is now on track to develop a robotics-based solution for removing large, complex debris from orbit.
This makes ClearSpace akin to Astroscale, the Japanese company that raised some $383 million in funding to remove space debris. The two startups differ in their technical approach, with ClearSpace basing itself on a modular robotic platform, but their origin is arguably an important difference.
While Piguet is convinced that there’s plenty of space (sic) for multiple players in this industry, he told Fortune that being European allows ClearSpace “to work closely with the ESA and other European partners on regulatory and funding matters, which can give us an edge in the European market.”
This also resonated with investors; in 2023, ClearSpace raised a €26 million Series A round of funding led by Swisscom Ventures and OTB Ventures, an Amsterdam- and Warsaw-based venture capital firm which is itself backed by the European Investment Fund and NATO Innovation Fund. OTB is also an investor in Kurs Orbital, an Italy-based satellite servicing startup founded by the former head of Ukraine’s space agency.
Beyond these European endeavors, though, the effort to ensure space remains clean is global, and so is ClearSpace. With teams in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the U.K., the startup has been collaborating with the U.K. Space Agency, which recently awarded it a new contract following successful completion of a previous phase. Meanwhile, Astroscale has several foreign subsidiaries to collaborate with various governments and organizations.
Good relationships with prospective customers are essential; there aren’t many, and the journey isn’t without challenges. Earlier this year, ClearSpace had to pivot its ClearSpace-1 mission for the ESA due to a collision of the removal target with untraceable debris; the parties agreed to change the target, which will also make for a more cost-effective approach.
For ClearSpace, this meant reorganizing its team, making 2024 “an intense year for the company,” Piguet said. He and his cofounder Muriel Richard, an aerospace industry veteran, believe that the company is now on track to demonstrate its capability in active debris removal by successfully launching its ClearSpace-1 mission.
However, this is just the beginning. Just like sustainability in other industries has meant more waste reduction in the first instance, ClearSpace wants to prevent debris thanks to a range of in-orbit services such as satellite servicing, refueling, and life extension. This was what brought Piguet to this problem in the first place, as he realized that space debris was “a side effect of an industry that does not have servicing embedded in its economic model.”
Unlike his cofounder, Piguet didn’t come into this field with a deep background in space. But as an entrepreneur with a belief in space’s immense potential for humanity, he saw the necessity to make sure it remains clean for future generations. “Our aim,” he said,” is to foster a worldwide movement for change, developing products and services that operators across the globe can and will adopt, ultimately benefiting the entire space industry.”
