With Australia’s decision to purchase Japanese Mogami frigates, defence ties with Japan have deepened, as have relationships in the space business where large and smaller players are interested in Australia’s growing space capabilities.
Among them is Astroscale, a Japanese company with a strong foothold in the emerging markets for space debris removal, observations of satellites in orbit but especially in on-orbit satellite servicing.
Astroscale was founded in 2013 by entrepreneur Nobu Okada whose vision was to develop satellite servicing as a business. The company now has presences in the US, UK, Europe and Israel but not yet Australia.
Company representatives are in Australia this week for the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2025 in Sydney
Astroscale chief operations officer Chris Blackerby, former NASA attache with the US Embassy in Tokyo, said the company wanted to work more with Australia.
“We have a lot of contacts in Australia and we are looking to expand the possibilities there,” he said.
“We have teams looking for collaboration. We have done some talking and work with HEO Robotics in the past. We know the Gilmour space guys well. We are connected in that way but right now no business but always looking for opportunities.”
Astroscale has already placed satellites in orbit. The first attempt in 2017 aboard a Russian Soyuz failed to reach orbit but a second 2021, also on a Soyuz, succeeded, with conjoined satellites demonstrating core capabilities to separate, rendezvous and re-attach.
A third mission, launched aboard a RocketLab rocket in February 2024 demonstrated close approach to an old Japanese rocket body, in orbit since 2009. A subsequent launch aims to de-orbit that large item of space junk.
But Astroscale’s primary business is on-orbit servicing, a capability so far demonstrated only by Northrop Grumman with its mission extension vehicles (MEV) and maybe China.
Satellites are expensive and capable of years of service, limited only by onboard fuel for adjusting attitude and altitude. Once the fuel is exhausted, the satellite is useless, thought it may otherwise function perfectly.
“We are proving out at this point the capabilities of approach, identify and dock with an object in orbit. We now have eight missions under development around the world to build on the technologies we have proven in those first few missions,” Blackerby said.
Demonstrating that this is entirely viable, Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) docked with the IntelSat 901 communications satellite in geostationary orbit in 2020, extending its life for an additional five years.
The MEV subsequently moved on to extend the life of the Australian Optus D3 satellite. MEV-2 is currently docked with Intelsat 10-02.
Geostationary orbit (geo), 36,000 kilometres above the earth, is where really high-value satellites reside, delivering communications, observation and national security capabilities.
Much closer is low earth orbit (LEO), where most small satellites and also space debris resides. That includes growing constellations of communications satellites such as Starlink.
Blackerby said there was a nascent interest in life extension of satellites in leo through boosting to a higher orbit.
“Observation and inspection for sure. Making sure that we are aware of threats, making sure that the capabilities that we have are not damaged at all, to be able to look at our own assets and at adversary assets,” he said.
“Companies are going to want to contract with us to go and extend the life of their satellite or do a close observation to see if there is anything wrong with it. We are going to have to prove the tech and so far, that’s something we have done that others are yet to do.
‘We need to be able to do it consistently. That is something we are going to find out in next several years.”
Currently satellite life extension involves the MEV docking with the client akin to a jet pack. Other than the physical connection, there’s no other linkage, though that could change.
Blackerby said the space industry group CONFERS, of which Astroscale is a member, was seeking to develop standard satellite interfaces to permit on-orbit fuel transfer.
“When things are not standardised it has a bunch of different players involved and no-one is able to scale up properly with the technology they have. Yes, we need to do that. For refuelling that has not been done yet,” he said.
Blackerby said space was a congested, contested and crowded environment.
“We need better awareness of the threats up there and ability to remove debris, to extend the lives of customer satellites and to track and be careful about where adversaries and threats might be,” he said.