One of my first startup ideas I pitched to YC was to deorbit the inactive LEO satellites/debris as as service utilizing kilowatt-class lasers utilize radiation pressure to degrade the orbit enough to let atmospheric drag take care of the rest.

Well due to (IIRC) the Outer Space Treaty, spacecraft launched is still owned by their original company and I dont think the original company, or anyone else for that matter wants to pay to cleanup their trash, therefore no market.

Didn't get interviewed for most likely that reason.

Do you have the math worked out on that? Were you going to use surface-based lasers or were you going to launch them somehow?

At the very least you could salvage a blog post out of this. :)

We decided against launching them because the laser would have a limited power supply and could only deorbit X amount of debris before completely depleting its power supply; something solar panels can't effectively recharge (well you'd need A LOT of them). Combine that with cost for launch, it gets pretty expensive to deorbit only a few satellites.

Because of this we went with surface based lasers; they could be recharged using the local grid and clean a specific section of the sky. We looked at placing lasers at locations with high altitude and cross referenced them with the local $ per kilowatt hour. Never really got to the stage of deciding where to place one since we were still stuck with figuring out the market for it. I guess someones active satellite needs to get Sandra Bullocked by some old debris before we start going "hey. there's a market for cleanup!".

The ISS is currently looking into a laser system to clean up debris if i remember correctly. I guess if they ever figure out the person who uses it would get to call him/herself "ISS Door Gunner"

Seems pretty capital intensive for YC. Do they have any history backing such ideas?