The management of the project was carried out by SENER AE smoothly with no mayor issues. The BMOM team was very active in the dissemination task. In term of public outreach, a special section about the BMOM project was created in the web site of E.T.PACK and a continuous presence in the media was maintained with appearance on Spanish national radio (RNE, Radio Euskadi) , newspaper (ABC, El Español) and television (La 1). UC3M maintained a close coordination with the E.T.PACK project providing relevant information during the weekly project meeting, ensuring that the latest information on the E.T.PACK development was available for the BMOM study.
Euroconsult performed a detailed analysis of the emerging orbital debris mitigation market with focus on Low Earth Orbit satellites up to 1200km. In particular satellites and launchers market were investigated and the number of potential customers were identified. The most promising market resulted to be the one of the small launchers being RFA the most interesting customer. This result reinforced the partnership with the German launch service provider that brought to the successful proposal of ETPACK-F. Euroconsult defined three use case scenarios using SENER and UC3M inputs and developed a business case for each of them providing financial indicators that indicate the commercial viability of the DK. The work included the deorbit, insurance and propulsion markets. Euroconsult analysed the commercial exploitation of the BETsMA v2.0 software providing valuables suggestion of cross marketing in combination with the DK product. On the technical side, SENER reviewed the E.T.PACK design and identified upgrades to increase the DK versatility. SENER provided an integrated development approach for accessing sequentially 3 markets: the deorbit market, the insurance/propulsion market and the IoS market. For each market, the cost and benefit indicators are provided under optimistic and pessimistic assumptions. SENER also reviewed deeply all the DK IPR and propose a scheme to define how to transfer all the exploitation right to a single entity, being SENER AE or a new start-up. During the full activity UC3M supported the definition of the DK use cases providing assessment on the tether applications including deorbit, station keeping and re-boost. For this the BETsMA software was modified. UC3M estimated the different scenario performance with simulations providing the main technical tether sizing data for each case. UC3M performed a benchmarking of the DK performances against other technologies. This analysis of the competitors was very helpful to identify the strengths and weakness of the DK. The analysis considered 12 criterion or characteristics that any deorbit technology should fulfil. The analysis of the software BETsMA as a future product was also carried out. Information was collected about other tether software around the world a brief market analysis was carried out by UC3M. Such analysis was extended deeply by Euroconsult and a roadmap towards the commercialization of the software was prepared. An important achievement for the software has been its use for the study of the use case proposed by several potential customers. Such activity gave visibility to the software and will also help the team to attract the attention of other companies.
