SCIENCE
Neuraspace CEO floats lunar scrapyards as a cleaner way to handle hardware left behind
INTERVIEW On August 5, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage is expected to crash into the Moon. Humanity has not done a great job of looking after the space around Earth. What could be done differently around the Moon?
Chiara Manfletti, CEO of satellite collision avoidance business Neuraspace, reckons one option could be to pick specific locations on the Moon's surface as dumping grounds where material can be deposited, collected, and recycled.
"I think it's actually more sustainable than, for example, re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Because, in the end, they are resources that we could reuse."
Manfletti is looking into the future, but in a few decades – if the plans of space agencies and their commercial partners are realized – the space around the Moon could rapidly become crowded. Neuraspace is all too aware of the situation around Earth, making the CEO well-placed to comment on what has and hasn't worked well in Earth's orbit and how things could be done differently around the Moon.
Around Earth, some orbits are protected and some are not, "which I think was never a good approach," says Manfletti, "because with the amount of objects going up, each and every orbit should be seen as protected." There are graveyard orbits, where spacecraft can be placed as an alternative to a controlled re-entry, although Manfletti says the approach is not particularly sustainable.
"Maybe one day we can reuse the material there."
The problem is how to persuade governments and industry to work together. "We don't have a single body," says Manfletti, "that can speak, and then everybody says: 'Oh, fantastic! They have spoken, and we shall do it!' It's not how it works."
When we spoke to Manfletti in 2024 about the state of the space around the Earth, she wasn't keen on regulations, partly because getting every nation and company to follow the same rules would be nearly impossible. A similar situation applies to the Moon, though there is an opportunity to do things differently.
"I think there are soft ways of going about it, where you see strong stakeholders that don't actually have legal power to impose. They can move things in the right direction.
"And all of a sudden, there's more of a demand for sustainable activities in orbit. And I think that around the Moon, in a sense, one could go that way.
"So who are the bigger players? It's the US, obviously, China… India is also starting to have a strong Moon program, Europe. So it's questionable whether China will put those requirements in, but I could imagine that Europe, the US, and India could.
"And that would certainly raise the bar as to what should be done."
Neuraspace uses AI and ML models to predict and compute the probabilities of collisions between satellites and other objects in Earth orbit. The number of objects has increased rapidly since we spoke to Manfletti in 2024, but it isn't the increase that took her by surprise. It was the sudden public awareness of space infrastructure.
"I think one of the things that perhaps was most surprising was the interfacing between space activities and the Ukraine war, which really raised awareness in terms of the importance of space.
"Everybody was talking about the spoofing and jamming of Galileo as von der Leyen was traveling, and the importance of space infrastructure became something that everyone was talking about.
"That, for me, was surprising. You always hope that people will understand the importance of space, but it just happened!"
As traffic to the Moon is set to increase, there is an opportunity to examine traffic management around Earth and consider what worked, what didn't, and what could be improved this time around. ®