UK Space Agency published the contract award notice today (21 Aug). ClearSpace has won the UK's first national Active Debris Removal mission — £61.3M excluding VAT, five year contract, capturing two UK-licensed defunct satellites from LEO by the early 2030s.
A few things stood out going through the actual tender documents:
This was a three-way competition, not two. Astroscale was the expected rival, but Starfish Space (a Seattle-based company) also made it to the final assessment stage. Not something that had been publicly reported before this notice.
This is also surprising as Astro scale arguably had the better flight heritage going in: ELSA-d, ADRAS-J (and to a smaller extent ELSA-M) gave them real uncooperative-rendezvous experience. ClearSpace-1 hasn't launched yet and has been suffering with numerous delays and a change in overall prime.
Both UK targets are explicitly uncooperative and unprepared: no docking aids, fully passivated. That's the hardest category of capture and nobody's pulled it off yet on a real object.
I think this is a really interesting decision from the UKSA and wonder what has gone on behind closed doors for this to have been the result. As someone in the industry, there was a lot of expectation that this was Astroscales to lose.
Full breakdown here if anyone wants the details: https://closingrange.substack.com/p/breaking-clearspace-wins-the-uks?r=7sbo3c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
ClearSpace beats Astroscale (and a surprise US bidder) to win UK's first national debris removal contract
byu/ClosingRange inspace
2 Comments
Super weird decision, going with the riskier option for such a high profile programme for UKSA
They’ve now got 5 years to prove they can do it. I get why they went with the UK option and not the US one. With how… volatile the USA has been lately it’s probably a good idea to give domestic companies a chance to grow in this space instead of just outsourcing this tech overseas.