The company believes the technology could end the space industry’s current throw-away culture and usher in a more sustainable era of reuse and recycling. But is the circular economy in space really possible?

Since the launch of history’s first satellite, the USSR’s Sputnik in 1957, around 26,000 satellites have been lofted into space, according to the European Space Agency. Out of those, more than 17,000 still orbit the planet, and over 15,000 are currently in service.

Astrophysicist and space historian Jonathan McDowell estimates that all these satellites combined make up around 17,000 metric tonnes of stuff. This material includes aluminum from satellite bodies, lithium from batteries, silicon-based photovoltaic panels and a plethora of other, rarer materials that can be found in on-board electronics.

As the vast majority of the world’s satellites reside in low Earth orbit — the region of space at altitudes below 2,000 kilometers — most of this matter will eventually spiral into Earth’s atmosphere, where it will burn up. That’s the way the space sector has been disposing of its refuse for decades.

Until recently, nobody objected. The amount of satellite debris evaporating in the atmosphere has long been just a drop among the thousands of tonnes of natural space rocks that meet a similar demise every year.

Space aficionados have an ambitious outlook. They think the next decade will bring rapid growth. New space technologies will be developed, including orbiting data centers, space-based solar power plants and orbital factories. Hundreds of thousands or even a million satellites could orbit the planet in the not-so-distant future. And with that, the amount of space junk turning into toxic ash in the atmosphere would skyrocket.

“We keep launching stuff and the de facto disposal methodology is to burn it up in Earth’s atmosphere or dump it in the ocean,” Gregory Vialle, the founder of Lunexus, a start-up promoting in-orbit recycling, told Supercluster. “That’s not a great approach from the resource perspective.”

The growing amount of debris burning up in the atmosphere worries scientists. The materials that satellites are made of are mostly alien to the atmosphere, not present in meteorites, and risk altering the planet’s already fragile climate. Aluminum, for one, turns into aluminum oxide when burnt. That substance is known to hasten ozone depletion. It also reflects sunlight, potentially causing a decrease in temperatures in the upper atmosphere. The effects of the other materials used in satellite manufacturing on atmospheric chemistry are mostly unknown.

But there are more pragmatic reasons why the space industry should explore more sustainable approaches, thinks Brian Taylor, CEO and founder of Lux Aeterna, and a former Starlink and Amazon LEO engineer.

“As a civilization, we build somewhere on the order of 10,000 satellites per year,” Taylor told Supercluster. “If we get to 100,000 or even a million satellites per year, there is no way that we can do that on a disposable basis and keep burning these satellites up in the atmosphere.”

“Reusable launch and lower launch costs really opened up the satellite industry, but we started seeing big delays in the supply chain,” he said. “We think we can address it through satellite reusability. By not building every satellite from scratch for every single mission, but instead, bringing the platform back to Earth and refurbishing it.”

Taylor points out the impacts reusable rocket stages, now commonly used by SpaceX's Falcon 9, have had on launch prices and the availability of launch.

Since SpaceX first rolled out the reusable first stage of Falcon 9 in 2017, launch prices have dropped from upwards of $10,000 per kilogram to low Earth orbit to less than $2,000 per kilogram. By not having to rebuild every single stage from scratch, SpaceX was able to increase the frequency of its launches nearly a hundredfold from a mere 18 in 2017 to 170 in 2025. SpaceX has yet to complete the development of its fully reusable Starship mega-rocket, which might push launch prices as low as $100 per kilogram, according to some sources.

The reduction in launch prices opened space up, if not to the masses, then at least to a wider range of technologists keen to explore new ideas and develop new applications. Where large satellites designed for decades-long missions once dominated, fleets of smaller, cheaper spacecraft designed to be replaced with next-gen technology every few years are now the staple. But Taylor thinks that as launch prices continue to drop, the trend might reverse once more.

“Many of the constraints on launch are different now than they were five or ten or fifty years ago,” said Taylor. “As the launch price goes down, it starts making sense to have a slightly heavier vehicle that is more robust and built for reuse.”

Lux Aeterna’s Delphi demonstration mission, scheduled to launch in early 2027, will attempt to demonstrate what the future of reusable satellites might look like. The 200-kilogram satellite is fitted with a conical heat shield that will protect the spacecraft during the fiery return to Earth.

Taylor said that Lux Aeterna has tested the heat shield in cooperation with NASA ahead of the launch next year.

During the test flight, Delphi will host a range of customer payloads, which will spend three months in space inside the spacecraft before splashing down to the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia.

The company has recently raised an oversubscribed $10 million seed round, which is enough to complete the mission, the company said.

UK-based Space Forge is also looking into returnable satellites. And although the company’s primary focus is on in-orbit manufacturing, its representatives have previously said that reusable satellites could help in the future slash the environmental impact of satellite re-entries.

California-based Arkysis wants to develop a network of orbital Ports — robotic space garages offering refueling and maintenance for satellites in orbit. Next year, the company plans to launch its demonstration space tug called the Cutter, designed to deliver spare parts, fuel, and broken spacecraft to the Port for repairs and upgrades.

Orbit Fab, headquartered in Colorado, is working on a network of orbital fuel depots and fuel shuttles intended to extend the lifetime of satellites beyond the limitations imposed by the size of their fuel tanks. The company launched a demonstration mission in 2021 and may conduct another by the end of 2026.

But analysts warn that weaning the space industry off its one-use-only mentality may not be that simple. Beril Turnbull, a space sustainability researcher at Durham University in the U.K. and one of the authors of the Secure World Foundation’s Exploring the Circular Economy in Space report, told Supercluster that technology has only made baby steps so far towards improving the sustainability of space operations.

“The existing fully linear economy in space is not sustainable, and we can’t keep going like that,” she said. “But we don’t have the technology for recycling in space. We have some technology for reusing and servicing. We have demonstrated refueling in the geostationary orbit, but we cannot say there is an economic case for refueling all satellites.”

Turnbull thinks that recycling and fixing things directly in orbit makes more sense than bringing stuff back to Earth, as Lux Aeterna envisions. Operators of cheaper low Earth orbit satellites may not see reasons to maintain their fleets for longer periods of time unless they are forced to by regulators. Still, Turnbull thinks that the low Earth orbit might get so dangerously cluttered that an intervention might be called for.

“Low Earth orbit is already very congested,” she said. “We keep hearing about accidents with space debris, and we keep hearing about the risk of the Kessler Syndrome. If we keep launching more, we will have more debris, and that will threaten future satellite operations. That’s why we might need to start doing something differently.”

She expects that in the next 10 to 15 years, more companies will conduct their demonstrations. First practical deployments of orbital recycling and refurbishing technologies might be possible in 15 to 20 years.

Turnbull points out that recycling poses challenges even to industries on Earth. On top of that, reused and recycled materials degrade with subsequent uses. A future when materials in space are constantly reused and recycled is, therefore, “just a fantasy idea,” she thinks.

“It will happen in the future to a degree. I don’t know the extent of it, but I am sure that it won’t be fully circular,” she says.

Lux Aeterna, in the meantime, is already planning its future steps. After the Delphi spacecraft returns to Earth, the company’s engineers will attempt to refurbish it for another mission, says Taylor. The firm is also working on a larger spacecraft capable of collecting more massive satellites.

“We believe that making reentry robust and reliable, and bringing hardware back and then getting human hands on the hardware is the best way to make an extremely reliable and robust infrastructure layer in orbit,” said Taylor.

“Our real goal is to build a fleet of those vehicles and have them moving up and down on a regular basis.”