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Ars:<\/strong>\u00a0You have another mission working with JAXA, ISSA-J1, to go rendezvous and inspect two decommissioned Japanese satellites. How is that different than inspecting a rocket body?<\/em><\/p>\n Blackerby:<\/strong> ADRAS-J2 is going to an oblong rocket body. It\u2019s not spinning. ISSA-J1 is going to satellites, and it\u2019s going to have to approach something that has a solar array sticking out, so we\u2019re expecting that it could be\u00a0spinning. So the RPO (rendezvous and proximity operations)\u00a0is definitely going to be more complex. We need to be able to develop this tech to precisely approach\u00a0this large piece of debris that likely is not going to be a stable object, and we\u2019re also going to a couple of them with ISSA-J1. A\u00a0lot of the technical capabilities that we\u2019ve developed by building out all of our missions\u2026 they share a common baseline in terms of technology as we think about the guidance, navigation and control, and the visualization and the RPO that\u2019s necessary to do this identification and approach. But there are all these little differences, and that\u2019s why each mission is\u00a0unique in its own\u00a0way, and it all builds to this larger dataset of learnings that we\u2019re developing, and\u00a0all of this is\u00a0in pursuit of this servicing ecosystem. If\u00a0we\u2019re going to get to this level of\u00a0servicing ecosystem for all aspects of security and economics and the sustainability of the space environment, we need to have this large dataset of approaching objects, of identifying objects, and of capturing objects, and so that\u2019s what we\u2019re building out across the board in the portfolio of our missions.<\/p>\n Ars:<\/strong>\u00a0So you\u2019re crawling before walking or running?<\/em><\/p>\n Blackerby:<\/strong> That\u2019s it. Our first mission, ELSA-D,\u00a0that was definitely a crawl. In that case, we brought our debris with us, and\u00a0let that go, and\u00a0then showed we could capture it. That was the\u00a0first step.<\/p>\n Astroscale\u2019s ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15, 2024.<\/p>\n Ars:<\/strong>\u00a0What is the operational use case for the technology Astroscale is developing?<\/em><\/p>\n Blackerby:<\/strong> I\u2019m assuming you mean like repeatable, consistent servicing. Every step we take is another step toward\u00a0that goal. It\u2019s hard for us to give a specific date on that or a timeframe. But the fact is, we\u2019ve got eight,\u00a0nine missions under manufacturing right now around the world. We have a variety already that are out there. None of them are on the level of, say, a repeatable multi-order service yet. That\u2019s going to come. It\u2019s just a matter of time. The missions that we\u2019re doing now, we\u2019ve taken these incremental steps. ELSA-D, our first mission, was fully internally funded. That was\u00a0funded by the money that we raised on the equity markets. ADRAS-J, the second mission,\u00a0that was that was jointly funded with JAXA, so we worked on that together. ELSA-M, we\u2019re working on that together with\u00a0ESA and the UK Space Agency. With ADRAS-J2, we\u2019re getting toward being revenue-positive\u00a0with these missions. Our missions going forward, for the\u00a0most part, are\u00a0revenue-positive. If we look at that from the perspective of sustainability, not of space, but of our company, economic financial sustainability, we\u2019re already getting to that point. We need to get more toward a commercially repeatable mission, and we\u2019re not there yet. But we\u2019d like to see, by the early part of the next decade, the early 2030s, that we\u2019re going to start seeing a more consistent, commercially viable servicing\u00a0ecosystem being developed.<\/p>\n