Building spacecraft for space situational awareness and in space logistics.
Created: 2021-08-29
Updated: 2024-07-15
Company - Turion Space
Product/Service - Droid
- Classification
- In-Space Transportation
- Category
- Active Debris Removal (ADR)
On-Orbit Servicing
Resources - Asteroid Mining
Space Situational Awareness (SSA)
- Fields
- In-Space Satellite Servicing
Asteroids
- Status
- Development, Launched
- First launch
- 2023
- Partners
- NanoAvionics
Our spacecraft will rendezvous and dock with current satellites and large debris objects using vision sensors and robotic arms. Utilizing the onboard propulsion system, the spacecraft will either deorbit or change the orbit of the debris object or satellite. Our team has a proven track record of bringing ideas to orbit with over 25 years of experience from SpaceX, Skunk Works, and Electroimpact. Solving this problem is crucial to ensure a sustainable space economy, and is the first step towards our longer term vision of mining Asteroids.
Flyby Inspection
Space Situational Awareness Data
Inspection and Orbit Relocation
Meet the Droid family…
- Droid-1 will launch ~2022. The goal is to reach a stable orbit, send over-the-air software updates, and test equipment. The subscale demo craft won’t have a docking mechanism.
- Droid-2, targeted for 2023, will be more functional. Turion plans to use Droid-2’s robo-arm to dock with Droid-1, deorbit, and demonstrate a fully functioning debris removal mechanism. Dogfooding in space!
- Droid-3, slated for 2024, will have a proprietary thruster and other bells and whistles. Turion plans to build and launch a batch of Droid-3s.
The sauce recipe: Droid-1 will have sensing payloads that Turion aims to rent out for space-to-space use cases (like situational awareness). After taking out the Droid-1 trash, Droid-2 will also be open for business. The Droid-3 generation is when volume production (relatively speaking) and scaled-up commercial services come into play.
First principles: Turion is optimizing for “Delta-V per dollar spent” on Droid design/development. Whether a Droid is deorbiting a dead satellite or shuttling a spent upper stage, all engineering and financial roads lead back to the Delta-V/$ metric, Westerdahl said.
- Turion plans to charge based on how much propellant is used for a job. Interested parties can input a space asset, select a service, and get a theoretical quote on Turion’s dashboard.
- Westerdahl places an emphasis on transparent, upfront pricing, taking a page from SpaceX, his former employer.
- Lithuania-based NanoAvionics built the bus for the satellite, which will provide imagery for Australian in-orbit inspection startup HEO Robotics, Turion Space’s first customer.
- Droid.001’s primary mission, however, is to test imagery capabilities that Westerdahl declined to specify for an SSA business he sees as a stepping stone toward more direct in-orbit services.
“By 2025, we want to do our first docking and de-orbit demonstration,” he said.
Turion Space Corporation, based in California, will address active debris remediation by developing a system involving several CubeSats and a carrier spacecraft that could remove multiple debris objects from low-Earth orbit in a single mission. The system draws on Turion’s past experience developing commercial spacecraft for inspection and orbital transport services. Turion’s debris remediation system could have additional commercial applications by collecting data when not performing debris removal missions.
DROID.001
Status Comment / Notes
DROID.001 or Droid-01 launched in June 2023. Fleet is planned to be deployed in early 2026 as of late 2023.
Sources
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