Astroscale to receive funding from Tokyo for its space debris clean-up mission
*This is a machine-translated text of the original article.
Astroscale Holdings, which develops a satellite for removing space debris, announced that Astroscale, its subsidiary in charge of research and development, would receive a subsidy of up to ¥500 million from Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
The company was selected for 2019 “Innovation Tokyo Project”, which is the initiative to Tokyo government aimed at helping commercialize innovative technology, through cooperation between start-ups and established businesses.
This project is to subsidize up to 500 million yen in part of the expenses required for development, improvement, demonstration, development of markets, etc. for innovative services and products of ventures and SMEs in Tokyo since FY2019.
Astroscale, which applied for a total of about ¥1 billion, will use subsidies from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for approximately three years to expand its global sales channels and promote joint research and development, as well as conduct safety reviews and risk surveys of customers and customer satellites and strengthen financial and human resources.
As in recent years private companies have launched small satellites in sets of tens to tens of thousands units to deploy for earth observation and communications services, the need for more measures to reduce and remove debris than ever before is called for.
Astroscale says it will launch a demonstration satellite “ELSA-d” in 2020 to eliminate debris, aiming to realize on-orbit services in which the satellites that will be launched in the future will reach the end of their life or will be removed in the event of permanent failure, as an effort to avoid further increases in debris.
Aiming for a safe and sustainable space environment for a long time, the company intends to establish a business model and cooperate with multiple private enterprises, organizations, and administrative organizations in addition to technological development related to debris removal in order to develop standards and best practices.
Original Text: https://ampmedia.jp/2020/01/27/space-5/