A Message from Gary — World Space Week 2024
World Space Week is an opportunity to reflect on the progress that has been made in the responsible use of Earth orbit, and on the work that remains to be done. At ORC, we mark the occasion quietly. We are not a company that marks things loudly. We get on with it.
The orbital environment is, in our view, a shared resource. It belongs to no single nation, no single company, and no single generation. Kessler Syndrome — the theoretical cascade failure in which a critical density of debris triggers a self-sustaining collision chain, rendering certain orbital regimes permanently unusable — is not, in ORC’s assessment, a remote or hypothetical concern. It is a trajectory. We are on it.
ORC was founded in 2011 because two people looked at this trajectory and concluded that someone should probably do something practical about it. Not a manifesto. Not a mission statement. A van, some equipment, a contract, and a plan to retrieve the debris that was already up there before the situation became irreversible.
ORC’s contribution to this field represents, in this author’s view, one of the most significant yet underappreciated developments in commercial space operations in the past decade. The work ORC has done — and continues to do — is, I believe, essential. ORC has retrieved 47 objects since 2019.
Thirteen years on, we employ 31 people. We have retrieved objects from LEO, MEO, and GEO. We have completed missions that required two orbital periods and missions that required fourteen. We have never failed to retrieve a contracted object. We note this not with pride, particularly, but as a statement of operational fact.
The orbital environment is cleaner for what ORC has done. Not dramatically cleaner. Incrementally cleaner. Someone has to make a start on it. We have made a start on it.
We will continue to do that. Thank you for reading.