We are glad to announce that Pi Campus invested in Turion Space, a startup building the technology required for humanity’s interplanetary future. The company was founded in 2020 by a team of three engineers: Ryan Westerdahl, who’s left SpaceX after 8.5 years; Tyler James Pierce, an aerospace engineer with experiences in aerospace-assembly-automation and vehicle analysis; and Patryk Wiatr, a full stack developer with almost 10 years of experience building and maintaining scalable web applications. The team recently completed the Y Combinator S21 program. Pi Campus took part in a seed round of $4,1M (not yet closed) participated also by Y Combinator, FoundersX Ventures, Harvard Management Company, Imagination Capital, Soma Capital, Zillionize, and Mercury Fund.
“Our short-term goal is to solve the most significant threat to humanity’s interplanetary future: orbital debris. If this problem is not addressed in the next 5-10 years, it could render entire orbits unusable for generations,” says CEO Westerdahl. According to Nasa, there are currently over 100 million pieces of space junk orbiting the Earth: 23,000 of which, larger than a softball and traveling at speeds up to 17,500 mph, could seriously damage a satellite or a spacecraft if a collision were to occur, as already happened in some occasions. Turion Space is building a spacecraft to remove debris by docking with it, using robotic arms, and dragging the debris to a lower orbit. It will be using the ion propulsion system the team is developing under a NASA technology transfer license. “Our solution is a reusable approach, designed from the beginning to complete multiple missions during the spacecraft lifetime,” says co-founder Pierce. The company expects to begin full commercial operations in 2024.
Commenting on the investment, Pi Campus CEO Marco Trombetti said: “In the next few years, tens of thousands of satellites will be launched into orbit. Many are working on building those satellites, and many on launching them, but only companies such as Turion Space have the opportunity to manage them providing support in the orbit”.
In the future, the startup aims at asteroid mining. “We started with the asteroid mining idea in mind, but the capital required to start a business on that premise seemed like a longshot, to say the least. We found the most important problem we could solve while building the foundation to asteroid resource extraction was to create a satellite system capable of removing orbital space debris” explains co-founder Wiatr.