The question of how to mitigate and clean up space debris and orbital debris is a growing concern among spaceflight experts and astronomers as companies like SpaceX’s Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, and others plan to build thousands of LEO satellite constellations. These satellites have a fixed lifetime, and while many are designed to die a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere, not all do.

This is where Astroscale plans to engage with End-of-Life Services with the Astroscale-Multiple (ELSA-M) instrument, a spacecraft designed to capture and remove decommissioned satellites. “Space is dangerously congested,” the video says, citing more than 2,200 unused satellites and more than 630 cases of in-orbit collisions with debris. “We have to act.”

In 2021, Astroscale launched the first flight of an earlier iteration of the ELSA-D instrument, successfully demonstrating its magnetic recapture capability later that year. A few months later, the company announced that it had grounded the spacecraft after discovering “abnormal spacecraft conditions.”

Astroscale’s new video shows the new ESLA-M exiting orbit. First, the spacecraft performs a visual inspection of the rendered customer satellite before performing alignment and berthing maneuvers. ELSA-M then uses its thrusters to de-orbit the client satellite into an atmospheric orbit where it will safely disintegrate on re-entry. When the client satellite is on a destructive course, the ESLA-M deactivates and adjusts its orbit to meet the next target.

On June 13, the company also announced about Launch of the second generation docking plate, which Astroscale says has a lifespan of more than 15 years in orbit. The board will allow the orbiting spacecraft to more easily capture satellites that need to be removed from orbit, offering what the company calls “various service options and a much-needed starting point for more responsible use of Earth’s orbital resources.”

Astroscale is partially funded by the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA) and aims to be the first company to demonstrate commercial use of this multi-satellite orbital service. In 2021 Astroscale’s UK subsidiary signed A deal worth $3.2m (£2.5m) mega constellation manufacturer OneWeb plans to launch more than 6,000 satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) to support its global communications service. The partnership aims to provide reliable OneWeb destruction services in conjunction with the termination of the expanding LEO network.

scheduled in 2024 show The ESLA-M, which will carry the disabled OneWeb satellite, is equipped with a docking plate configured to be captured by the ELSA-M gripper.