I am bothered that this is apparently being done by a private company on its own initiative and not under a US or other NATO military contract.
This isn’t like designing a rifle. Just developing this stuff is serious business.
My take is that this is an audition tape for a US military contract. Unsolicited, yeah, but they’re using VC money to build a capability that they believe will be ordered very soon. Rational! Long-term prisoner’s-dilemma winning? No.
Really not looking forward to explaining what Kessler Syndrome is and why “magnets” won’t fix it to a bunch of people in the near future.
You would have to clear it like a moon clearing its orbit with gravity, but how would you get that much mass up there? You’d have to start with one small enough to loft and start accreting smaller debris…
