Forget social or ecommerce. Get your startup into space

One of the most remarkable startups we uncovered last year was Astroscale. The Japanese-born, Singapore-based entrepreneur behind Astroscale, Nobu Okada (pictured below), is working on space missions that will clear up litter just outside the Earth’s atmosphere – floating space junk that can knock out expensive and vitally important satellites.

“The space industry looks like the 1989-90 internet industry,” Okada said today in a keynote at our Tech in Asia Singapore 2015 conference. Along with this very early boom, he views space and space tech as a sector that’s now open – for the first time – to anyone.

“You don’t need to be in the US. You don’t need to be rich. You don’t need to be a space engineer,” Okada told the audience. His own background is in genetics.

His firm, Astroscale, is working toward the 2017 launch of its first “mothership” that can dock one space litter-sweeping “Boy” craft. By 2021, the plan is for a new mothership that can dock six Boys. These Boys snap up junk like some kind of astronomic Pacman, then tow it into the Earth’s atmosphere for incineration.

Don’t expect Russia to tidy up

The debris problem in space is massive, Okada says, which makes it an exciting new market for tech startups to tackle. He says that experts agree space will be unusable in a few decades due to the amount of trash hurtling in stray orbits around our planet. All those old satellites, burnt-out rockets, and rubbish discarded by astronauts endanger the satellite networks we depend upon for things like GPS, weather forecasts, and broadcasting.

We’re already “caged” by all this crap, Okada emphasizes. When Ecudaor sent up its first satellite, the jubilation soon turned to despair when it was hit by debris after just one month. These incidents will only become more common as space junk proliferates, and each crash creates more – and smaller – bits of trash floating around out there. At a certain point, it becomes so small that the danger cannot be detected from Earth. But when it’s traveling at 7 kilometers per second, a fragment smaller than a marble can cause devastation to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of space kit.

Don’t expect the world’s space leaders to clean all that up. 55 percent of space junk was created by Russia, 28 percent is from from the US, and 11 percent comes from China. But those countries are not keen to pay. “They want beneficiaries to pay the cost [of clean-up],” says Okada.

Now, Okada stresses, is the time for startups to apply tech to space – and raise funding, just like Astroscale did recently, and like Elon Musk’s SpaceX has done on numerous occasions. He sees it as a tech business option right up there with social, ecommerce, or biotech.

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