Last week, Jon Beam and Kyle Cybul joined the Spire Running team for dinner before our Don’t Waste Your Life book study. Jon and Kyle work for Rogue Space Systems and were in town for a space conference. They are also contributors to a research paper titled: The Case for a Circular Space Economy, and what they’re working on is genuinely frontier-finding.
Here’s the problem Jon and Kyle are trying to solve. Currently, when a satellite runs out of fuel, breaks down, or comes to the end of its useful life, it is abandoned. Fifteen thousand tonnes of mass are currently orbiting Earth. These are potentially valuable materials and functional components that are just left in space. The dominant model for handling space waste is build it, launch it, discard it. The space industry calls this the Linear Space Economy.
Jon and Kyle are challenging this model, and they’re building the framework for what comes next: a Circular Space Economy where assets are refueled, repaired, repurposed, and eventually recycled rather than abandoned.
This isn’t just theoretical dreaming; rather, it’s an architecture for a permanent human presence in space.
What struck me while discussing this with Jon and Kyle is that they’re working on something where most of the infrastructure, business models, governance frameworks, and technologies don’t exist yet. Jon and Kyle are not iterating on something established. They’re making the case to industry, governments, and investors that an entirely different model is both necessary and possible, and they’re mapping out how to get there.
Jon and Kyle are examples of what frontier finding looks like. Today, they’re doing the hard work of building the argument, convening the right people, and pushing ideas forward, so that one day we will have a vibrant, sustainable future in space.
The paper Jon and Kyle contributed to lays out a timeline running to 2050. They know it won’t happen in a straight line. They know there are obstacles, from regulatory gaps and immature technologies to industry inertia. But they’re building anyway.
That’s worth paying attention to. That’s worth knowing. That’s an example of Frontier Finding.
