Active Debris Removal · LEO 500–800 km
Waypoint Dynamics is developing small, reusable servicers that rendezvous with derelict satellites and rocket bodies, capture them, and put them on a reentry trajectory — then recover and do it again. We are a mission services company, built by operators, for the regime where debris is no longer optional to ignore.
Concept of operations · WPD-S/1
A live procedural visualization of a single capture cycle — cruise, proximity ops, net deploy, de-tumble, retrograde burn, ejection, and recovery. Loops continuously.
Concept visualization — not to scale. Targeting in-orbit technology demonstration: 2028.
Mission
Waypoint Dynamics is building the systems to remove large, end-of-life satellites and rocket bodies from Low Earth Orbit — under contract to government and commercial clients — to preserve the long-term viability of space for all users.
We exist because orbital debris is no longer a theoretical risk. It is an accumulating liability with a legal mandate and a financial consequence for every satellite operator on Earth. We are built by operators, for operators. The discipline that made commercial aviation the safest mode of transportation in history is directly transferable to rendezvous-and-proximity operations in space — and that transfer is intentional.
The orbital debris crisis
Each new mega-constellation adds thousands of satellites and, eventually, thousands of end-of-life disposal events. Without commercial removal infrastructure, the math does not close.
Concept Design · WPD-S/1
In development — concept validated, heritage subsystems flight-proven.
Solar-Powered Active Remediation & Re-entry Orbital Wrangler. A 12U-class servicer that rendezvous with derelict objects, captures them with a tethered net or magnetic head, imparts a retrograde delta-v with a low-thrust Hall-effect engine, and releases them onto a re-entry trajectory before recovering to a parking orbit for the next cycle. Built around three flight-demonstrated capture technologies and a flight-qualified electric propulsion stack.
Hall thruster phases altitude using Space-Track and commercial SSA catalog tracking; vision-based GNC guides approach.
Closes to ~5 m with cold-gas RCS, characterizes the tumble axis, and matches rotation with FEEP-trimmed attitude control.
Tethered net for tumbling, irregular debris — primary. Magnetic head for cooperative satellites with a ferromagnetic plate — secondary.
Tether winches in; the debris seats against the +V capture cradle and is rigidized for the deorbit burn.
Hall thruster fires retrograde over multiple sunlit arcs — a continuous spiral that walks the perigee down over days.
Below ~150 km perigee, the cradle springs the debris free with a ~0.5 m/s tangential kick. Reentry follows within 1–3 orbits.
Sparrow raises its own perigee back to the holding orbit and proceeds to the next target in-plane. Repeat.
Concept Design · WPD-D/1
In development — architecture defined, vehicle-agnostic interface in design.
A standalone passive orbital depot that aggregates up to 12 captured defunct satellites and deorbits the entire stack in a single controlled reentry. Vehicle-agnostic — accepts deliveries from Waypoint's Sparrow servicer or any compatible third-party ADR vehicle through the open SPARROW Carrier Cassette (SCC) interface. SCAVENGER carries no capture hardware of its own. It waits, accepts cargo, and disposes cleanly.
“Think dumpster, not tow truck. The dumpster sits in one place and waits. Trucks of any brand pull up, drop off, and leave. When the dumpster is full, it goes away as one unit. The economics of orbital debris removal start to resemble terrestrial waste management.”
Existing ADR architectures bundle capture, storage, and deorbit into a single bus. SCAVENGER pulls those functions apart. The capture work — high-risk proximity ops with tumbling debris — stays on the servicer. The storage and disposal work moves to a separate, simpler vehicle optimized for that one job. By amortizing the deorbit cost across twelve objects per mission, SCAVENGER drives per-object disposal cost below $3M.
The architecture is intentionally open. Standardized dockports follow the published SCC specification that any servicer can build to. SCAVENGER is infrastructure — in-space industrial capacity that Waypoint, ESA, Astroscale, and future entrants can all pay to use.
After cassette latch, an electrical handshake confirms rigid mating and reports cassette mass and ID to SCAVENGER avionics. The depot's dock-assignment optimizer routes incoming cassettes based on real-time CG balance, distributing mass evenly across the carousel before deorbit.
SCAVENGER launches to its 750 km sun-synchronous depot orbit. Solar arrays deploy, dockport mechanisms verified, clamshell bay doors open. 30 days of on-orbit commissioning.
Depot declared ready to accept deliveries. Pre-coordinated servicers — Waypoint Sparrow and any contracted third-party — begin their capture sorties.
A servicer arrives with a loaded cassette. Far-range nav to 20 m hold point, forced-motion station-keeping, approach and dock at next available port. Cassette latches; servicer backs away.
All 12 dockports occupied (or partial load with closeout justified by mission economics). Clamshell doors close. Stack verified rigid via load-cell handshakes on every port.
300 m/s chemical deorbit burn. Targeted reentry over the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area. SCAVENGER and all 12 cassettes burn up together. Mission ends.
A successor SCAVENGER (WPD-D/2 et seq.) is co-manifested in advance and is already on station nearby, ready to accept the next round of deliveries. Service continuity is the point of the architecture.
Without SCAVENGER, every servicer must include propellant, hardware, and ops time to deorbit each captured target individually — typically driving cost-per-object above $50M. With SCAVENGER, the servicer's responsibility ends at the dockport.
Commercial model. Per-dock pricing at ~$3.5M per cassette delivered. Reservation-based scheduling. Vehicle-agnostic — Sparrow is the reference customer; third-party ADR operators license the SCC interface and use SCAVENGER as shared disposal infrastructure. Long-term: a constellation of SCAVENGER depots positioned across the most congested LEO altitude bands turns orbital debris disposal into a continuous industrial service.
Concept Design · WPD-F/1
In development — concept defined, propellant heritage flight-proven.
A 1,200 kg orbital propellant depot parked at 600–650 km / 53° carries enough krypton and green-monopropellant to refuel a Sparrow five times. With a RAFTI-class fluid coupling and a beacon for rendezvous, the depot turns Sparrow from a 4–5-capture vehicle into one bounded by avionics wear, not tank size. One depot underwrites a fleet.
4–5 captures per refuel cycle becomes 15–25 across the vehicle's design life. The binding constraint shifts from tank size to avionics wear and radiation dose.
With a depot in the architecture, Sparrow's wet mass drops from ~500 kg to ~350 kg — half the propellant onboard, smaller fairing slot, cheaper per-vehicle launch.
Per-mission cost floor falls from ~$15–20 M without a depot to ~$4–6 M with one, spread across the ~25 Sparrow missions a single depot enables.
No return-to-launch refuel cycle. A Sparrow on station can be back in the chase within days of a debris event — the difference between catching a fragmenting object and chasing its cloud.
A single depot supports multiple Sparrows. Three servicers and one depot is more economical than four servicers alone — and the same depot can serve other operators' RAFTI-compatible vehicles.
Most ADR competitors have no depot path. Sparrow + Depot is a structural moat at fleet scale, and the depot itself becomes a revenue line on top of the removal contracts.
Ship Sparrow standalone. Demonstrate capture and deorbit on the dedicated flight demo. Confirm RAFTI as the industry interface.
Launch the depot once Sparrow service has demand. Transition the fleet to the smaller depot-coupled bus. Open the RAFTI interface to other operators as infrastructure-as-a-service.
Technology
Sparrow draws directly on three flight-demonstrated capture technologies — net, magnetic plate, drag-sail — combined with a flight-qualified Busek BHT-200 Hall thruster and an Enpulsion IFM Nano FEEP for fine proximity ops. The differentiator is not exotic hardware. It is the mission operations culture wrapped around it.
LiDAR point clouds, monocular and stereo vision, and onboard inference for real-time pose estimation of a tumbling, non-cooperative target. Safe-hold and abort logic built on aviation-derived crew resource management.
Heritage · RemoveDEBRIS · ADRAS-J approachBusek BHT-200 Hall thruster: 200 W, 13 mN, Isp ~1,390 s. A 75 kg stack walks its perigee from 700 to 120 km on ~160 m/s of delta-v — about 11 days of sunlit-arc thrusting. One ~3 kg propellant load supports about ten cycles.
Heritage · Busek BHT-200 · Enpulsion IFM NanoNo single capture mechanism is mandated for every target. Flight software and ground ops choose based on tumble state and geometry data gathered during approach. Net is primary; magnetic plate is secondary; drag-sail is contingency.
Heritage · RemoveDEBRIS net · Astroscale ELSA-d · NanoSail-D2Written procedures for every phase. Two-operator console teams with explicit speak-up authority. A Mission Operations Director with independent scrub authority — the Part 121 dispatcher model — over the operational crew. Recurrent simulation. No improvisation during critical phases.
Heritage · 40+ years of Part 121 aviation operationsTeam
Engineering-led ADR companies are well-funded and technically capable. They are not the only model. Government buyers — particularly DoD — reward demonstrated operational maturity when evaluating whether a commercial provider can be trusted with proximity operations near national security assets. We were built around that reward.
CEO & Founder
Director of Flight Operations. Chief Pilot. Director of Training. A career spent inside the discipline that made commercial aviation the safest mode of transportation in human history — and a deliberate decision to import that discipline, not just its language, into the rendezvous-and-proximity-operations regime.
CTO · Open
Senior engineer with at least one flight-heritage RPO mission. Owns technical architecture, leads the engineering team through TRL 6, principal investigator on SBIR proposals. Equity target 25–35%, four-year vest, one-year cliff. Pre-condition for full seed close.
Contact
Government program offices, commercial constellation operators, capital partners, and prospective hires — start a conversation. We respond within two business days.