Liza Fust
Liza Fust
The Legend of Laelaps

3 minute read - What's in a name? More than you might think. KMI's first spacecraft needed a title that not only symbolized its mission but also paid homage to the myths of old. After much debate, we landed on "Laelaps"—a name rooted in Greek legend. But what does a mythic hound, destined to catch everything it chases, have to do with space?

The Legend of Laelaps

Adam Kall

Unaccounted Externalities

Unaccounted Externalities

7 minute read - From solar panels to space debris, our journey at KMI is driven by more than just innovation - it's about preserving the future. Our fight against orbital junk parallels our earthly endeavors for a cleaner planet. Adam Kall attempts to tackle his emissions with a keen eye on cost vs. CO2e reduction and now, he’s applying that same logic to the cosmos. Discover how KMI is making active debris removal not just a necessity but an economically viable option for safeguarding the space industry's future.

Fission to Fusion, Part 2

Fission to Fusion, Part 2

5 minute read - Adam Kall further explores fusion: the often-described future of energy and the key to unlocking the utopian Star Trek existence of a post-scarcity economy. Ideals of fusion energy have continued to run into issues of reality, and there may be a new form of energy generation based on the same principles but far more appropriate for creating a future of abundance. 

What Makes a Good Chart

What Makes a Good Chart

5 minute read - A well-made chart can be an amazing way to convey a lot of information and associations in a short amount of time and a small amount of space. With the multifaceted aspects of orbital debris, KMI often uses charts to demonstrate massive amounts of information. The issue is in the abundance of very poorly made charts, which at best don’t convey much usable information and at worst purposefully mislead. Many articles have been written that go over examples of bad charts and why they are bad, but in this column, Adam Kall, Director of Technology, focuses on explaining ways to make charts more useful.

Discounting Our Future

Discounting Our Future

7 minute read - The concept of removing space debris centers on paying a cost now to protect value in the future. Economists have dealt with solving this problem terrestrially for hundreds of years, and I’ll use the same approach for our space-based issue of debris. That problem, on which we base a solution, will be estimated at a nearly $50 billion annual risk to the industry, reaching its apex in 15 years time, due to space debris. The solution prevents this risk from existing, and the active debris removal portion of it should be pursued for up to $15,400 per kilogram of debris removed.

Hooking the Sky

Hooking the Sky

4.5 minute read - The current way humanity gets into space is highly expensive, and even worse, not great at bringing things back. Discussions about a space industry have an often unspoken clause, that if we do achieve orbital manufacturing or asteroid mining, it would be expensive and difficult to get those goods back to Earth for use by the average person or industry. The main problem is that it takes a lot of speed to get into Earth orbit, plus a lot more to go farther, and you need to slow down a lot before returning to Earth if you don’t want to end up as barbeque. However, there is an exciting exploit of the universe that may help us change this whole dynamic, and really start to connect the people and industries of Earth with the rest of the solar system, known as the skyhook.

No Borders in Space

No Borders in Space

4 minute read - Most astronauts remark that, once they get into space, the divisions on Earth become far less apparent and it really looks like one whole of humanity. This viewpoint is for a variety of reasons. Possibly because things like border walls and crossing checkpoints are too thin to be viewable from space, or that the land isn’t conveniently colored like the maps and globes we grew up seeing in school. I would add another reason to the list, and that is that because of orbital dynamics it is not possible to effectively secure a region of space as belonging to any one country.

Why We Can’t “Just Blow It Up”

Why We Can’t “Just Blow It Up”

4 minute read - In Netflix's "Space Force" a repeated comedic element is the militaristic advice to solve a problem through explosives, to the chagrin of the nearby scientists. This column details how truly terrible this suggestion would be particularly as it pertains to space. When considering the use of explosions to deal with space debris, having more energy in a smaller object is a combination worse together than the sum of its parts. Prior to an explosion, there would be a single trackable object with a determined path, so it could be calculated whether that path collided with something else, and how to move out of the way or prepare for it.

On a Pale Blue Dot

On a Pale Blue Dot

5 minute read - “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” - Carl Sagan

This image, known as Pale Blue Dot, was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14th, 1990, at Carl Sagan’s suggestion. On the right side of the image suspended in a beam of sunlight is a single white pixel that is the Earth, seen from a distance farther than the orbit of Pluto at 4 billion miles. I always have strong emotions when I look at this image, read Carl Sagan’s accompanying statement, and take a moment to appreciate just what it represents. These emotions could be fear and anxiety, which would be perfectly understandable considering how fragile our home looks from such a distance, but for me they have become feelings of purpose and direction. This image does not make me think “Look how small and vulnerable we all seem,” but instead “Look how close we are to the start of our journey, and how much more there is to achieve.”

Space Traffic Management and Defense

Space Traffic Management and Defense

4 minute read - Activity in space has been growing steadily since the first satellite in 1957, but this rate is increasing dramatically as reduced launch costs enable constellations of hundreds and thousands of satellites to be launched quickly. The situation has become one of dangerous disregard for organization, as evidenced by an event on September 2nd, 2019 when the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Aeolus Earth observation satellite had to maneuver out of the way of a Starlink constellation satellite. When this potential collision was uncovered, the two operators struggled to communicate on what combined action should be taken, and while the end effect was thankfully safe, it could easily have resulted in disaster had both sides decided to do nothing.