Active debris removal
JUJUME, LLC / Los Angeles
We design, build and operate robotic spacecraft that rendezvous with, capture and de-orbit the debris and dead satellites crowding Earth orbit, so the satellites, crewed missions and science the world depends on have somewhere safe to fly.
The environment we work in
Rounded public estimates, low Earth orbit and above
13,000tonnes
Mass on orbit
Material launched since the late 1950s that is still circling the planet, most of it no longer under anyone's control.
9,000+
Working satellites
Operational spacecraft sharing those shells, a population that has grown several times over in a decade.
7.8km/s
Orbital velocity
Typical speed in low Earth orbit. Impact energy rises with the square of velocity, so even small fragments are destructive.
Centuries
Natural decay
Above roughly 800 kilometres there is too little drag to bring a derelict object down on any useful timescale.
Figures rounded from public satellite catalogues and the European Space Agency's space environment reporting.
The problem
Mitigation rules slow down how fast new debris appears. They do nothing about the mass already up there. Removal is the only thing that does.
Every satellite that stops working stays on orbit. So does every spent upper stage, every separation ring, every fragment thrown off by a collision or an old battery rupture. None of it decays on a human schedule. At 800 kilometres an abandoned object can hold its orbit for centuries, crossing the paths of working spacecraft thousands of times a year.
That makes the environment more crowded and more fragile at the same time. More than nine thousand working satellites now share their shells with tens of thousands of trackable derelicts and an estimated million or more fragments that are too small to catalogue and still large enough to end a mission on contact. Operators fly collision avoidance manoeuvres they did not budget for, spend propellant they cannot replace, and accept warning screens they cannot act on because the object in question was never catalogued in the first place.
The uncomfortable part is the arithmetic of fragmentation. A single break-up between two large derelicts produces thousands of new tracked objects and many times that number of untracked ones, each of which becomes a new collision risk. Risk does not grow in proportion to traffic. It compounds.
Design standards and disposal requirements are the right first response, and they are tightening quickly. But the objects that drive most of the long-term risk were launched before any of those rules existed. They carry no docking interface, no working transponder and in many cases no attitude control at all. They will not come down unless something goes up and brings them down. That is the work JUJUME was built to do.
Bar lengths are shown on a logarithmic scale. Populations are statistical estimates, not catalogue counts.
Orbit is infrastructure. Nobody maintains it, and everybody depends on it.
Our position
What we do
Two principal service lines, de-orbiting at end of life and removing high-risk debris, supported by the rendezvous, capture and operations capabilities that make any removal mission possible.
01
Controlled disposal of spacecraft that have reached the end of their working lives, including the ones that failed before they could de-orbit themselves. We rendezvous with the satellite, capture it and bring it down on a deliberate, predictable path instead of leaving it to drift as a hazard for decades.
02
Targeted removal of the massive, poorly placed derelicts that account for an outsized share of long-term collision risk. Taking the worst few objects out of a congested shell does more for that shell than years of avoidance manoeuvres by everyone flying in it.
03
Closing the last few hundred metres to an object that was never built to cooperate, and in many cases is tumbling. Our spacecraft approach, inspect, characterise motion and hold station alongside a target with the control needed to do something useful next.
04
A compliant grasping system that conforms to awkward geometry rather than demanding a purpose-built fixture. Compliance is what makes a tumbling, uncooperative object tractable: the mechanism accommodates residual motion instead of fighting it. Preliminary and critical design reviews are complete.
05
The hard parts of refueling a healthy satellite and removing a dead one are the same: reach it safely, hold onto it, and transfer something across the interface. We have identified refueling as a natural extension of the platform for operators who would rather extend a mission than replace it.
06
Every removal is a mission in its own right. We define the target, plan the trajectory and capture windows, and fly the campaign from deployment through controlled disposal, with the documentation operators and regulators need at the end of it.
The hardware
A carrier that gets capture capability to where the targets actually are, and a servicer that does the close work once it arrives. Between them sits the soft robotic capture system that makes contact possible.
01 / Capture and servicing vehicle
The vehicle that does the close work. It performs the rendezvous and proximity operations needed to approach an uncooperative target, deploys the capture system to grasp it, then carries out controlled de-orbiting of the captured object.
02 / Orbital mother vehicle
The mother vehicle. It transports and deploys the servicer, supplying the propulsion, power and reach to position capture capability across different orbital locations rather than a single fixed shell.
03 / Core technology
A compliant grasping mechanism developed in house as the centre of our technical approach. Where a rigid mechanism needs a precise, cooperative interface, a soft system conforms to what is actually there.
Concept of operations
Seven phases, from the catalogue entry to the confirmation that an object is gone. Every one of them has to work for the last one to count.
01
Mass, size, geometry, orbit and attitude state. What the object was, how it failed, and what can be grasped once we are alongside it.
02
Trajectory, phasing strategy, capture windows and propellant budget, set against the customer's timeline and the licensing picture for that orbit.
03
The carrier reaches its operating orbit and checks out. Subsystems are verified before anything approaches anything else.
04
Orbit raising, plane matching and drift control bring the servicer into the same neighbourhood as the target, within sensing range.
05
Relative navigation takes over. The servicer holds station, inspects the object, measures its tumble and confirms a grasp point before committing.
06
Final approach along the agreed corridor and a compliant grasp. The mechanism accommodates the motion that remains, then the stack is stabilised as one body.
07
A deliberate disposal burn sequence on a predictable path, followed by the tracking evidence and documentation that show the object is no longer a hazard.
Every approach has hold points and abort criteria defined before the campaign begins. A removal mission that creates debris has failed, no matter what it captured.
Who we serve
Our work is cross-border by default. The objects do not respect borders, and neither does the risk they create.
01
Fleet owners who need end-of-life disposal they can prove, and a way to deal with the spacecraft that failed before they could dispose of themselves.
02
Programmes turning sustainability policy into physical results, where the measure of success is objects removed rather than guidance published.
03
Agencies that have identified priority objects and need an operator able to reach them, hold onto them and bring them down on schedule.
How we work
Removal only matters at scale, and scale is an engineering and economic problem before it is anything else. Four commitments shape every decision we make about the system.
01
A removal service nobody can afford removes nothing. Cost per object is treated as a requirement, not an outcome.
02
Our own mission must not add to the problem it exists to solve. Disposal is designed in from the start, for the target and for our own hardware.
03
We assume no docking interface, no working transponder and no attitude control. Anything friendlier than that is a bonus.
04
We design, build and commercially operate the spacecraft ourselves, which keeps mission planning and flight operations tied to the vehicles doing the work.
Where we are
JUJUME is an early-stage, venture-backed company building hardware, a flight programme and a team. A snapshot of where things stand today.
Get in touch
Whether you operate a constellation, steward a national programme or want to build the hardware, we would like to hear which object is keeping you up at night.