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From homemade “childhood” rockets to hunting space debris: The Greek behind Project-S
🇬🇷 Greece /Technology

From homemade “childhood” rockets to hunting space debris: The Greek behind Project-S

From Ta Nea · () Greek

Translated from Greek and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources New plan
  • At 22, Greek aerospace entrepreneur Leonidas Askianakis leads Project-S, a European startup focused on space-debris tracking and removal.
  • The company aims to develop an end-to-end system covering debris detection, collision avoidance, and eventual removal.
  • More than 1.2 million objects measuring 1 to 10 centimeters are currently orbiting Earth, according to NASA and ESA data cited in the article.

At 14, Leonidas Askianakis was making improvised rockets with a friend in Arkalochori, Crete. At 22, he is behind Project-S, a European space-technology startup pursuing a solution to one of the problems expanding with human activity in orbit: the millions of fragments of space debris circling Earth.

The stakes are practical as well as technical. Telecommunications, weather forecasting, and other services now depend on systems in orbit. Alongside that activity, however, the less visible problem of space “rubbish” continues to grow. Data from NASA and the European Space Agency cited by the company says more than 1.2 million objects measuring between 1 and 10 centimeters are currently in orbit. Most are fragments of old satellites and other space systems, but even small pieces can cause serious damage in a collision.

That is the problem Askianakis wants to tackle. His interest in space began in his childhood in Arkalochori, although he did not come from a family of engineers. His father is an agronomist and his mother works as a travel agent. He later studied aerospace and moved into the space sector.

Together with a friend in Arkalochori, we made rockets when we were 14, from fertilizers and whatever else we could find with chemicals. We nearly exploded.

— Leonidas AskianakisHe recalled his early experiments with homemade rockets in Crete.

Askianakis encountered the debris problem in Munich while working with the German Aerospace Center, particularly its Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. He worked on the technologies needed to detect a target, lock onto it, and eventually remove it from orbit. He decided the approach he was developing should become more than an academic publication, and Project-S was founded in 2022.

Based in Munich, with a presence in Greece and the United States, the company aims to build a complete system for safer space operations. Its approach goes beyond locating debris. Project-S wants to cover the chain from identifying a dangerous object to avoiding a possible collision and, at a later stage, removing it. Askianakis describes this as an “end-to-end solution,” combining information on debris locations with measures to manage the threat.

Essentially, what we do is provide the end-to-end solution.

— Leonidas AskianakisHe describes Project-S’s ambition to cover space-debris monitoring and response from detection through possible removal.
About this summary

Originally published by Ta Nea in Greek. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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