WASHINGTON – Astroscale has signed a contract with the Japanese space agency JAXA for a mission to remove a defective upper stage from Earth orbit.

The Tokyo-based company said in an Aug. 19 regulatory filing that the company’s board of directors had approved a contract with JAXA for the Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan 2 (ADRAS-J2) mission worth 12 billion yen ($82.1 million). Astroscale had announced in April that it had been selected by JAXA for the mission, but did not disclose the value of the contract at the time.

ADRAS-J2 will fly to the same H-2A upper stage that was left in orbit after a 2009 launch and is currently being inspected by the company’s ADRAS-J spacecraft. ADRAS-J has come within 50 meters of the stage and flown around it to assess the stage’s condition.

ADRAS-J2, the second phase of JAXA’s Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration (CRD2) program, will return to this phase, pin it down, and then lower its orbit for disposal. Astroscale did not say when ADRAS-J2 would launch in the announcement, but a slide in a company business update presentation, also released on Aug. 19, projected a launch in the company’s fiscal year 2028, which ends in April 2028.

The order value is slightly higher than Astroscale expected. Nobu Matsuyama, the company’s chief financial officer, said in a presentation on August 19 that the company had estimated the order value at 11.4 billion yen, but did not explain what the reason for the increase was.

The ADRAS-J2 contract is a big addition to the company’s backlog, which was valued at 5.4 billion yen, according to the April presentation. Astroscale’s UK subsidiary also signed a contract for the final phase of the ELSA-M satellite’s deorbiting mission in July, adding more than 2.3 billion yen to the backlog.

The company expects to convert this backlog into revenue over the next few years. Astroscale had revenue of nearly 4.7 billion yen in the 2024 fiscal year ended in April, which it said included contract revenue and government subsidies. The company forecasts revenue of 18 billion yen for 2025.

Astroscale went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in June, raising 20.1 billion yen at a share price of 850 yen. Shares soared on the day of the IPO, reaching as high as 1,581 yen, but fell in the following weeks, hitting a low of 513 yen in early August before recovering to around 1,000 yen.

In light of public market scrutiny, Astroscale is focusing on profitability. “We aim to achieve an operating profit close to breakeven in fiscal year 2026 through continued growth,” said Nobu Okada, CEO and founder of Astroscale, at the press conference.

Matsuyama said later in the briefing that gross profit should be close to breakeven in fiscal 2025, albeit with an operating loss that will be higher than the 11.5 billion yen recorded in 2024. He said this will improve as the company’s research and development costs fall, adding that the company’s cash balance should be enough to put the company into profitability without additional capital raisings.

The company is looking for additional revenue opportunities, such as with deorbit services for the first-generation OneWeb constellation. Matsuyama pointed out that 568 OneWeb satellites have docking pads that allow them to be removed by servicing spacecraft based on Astroscale’s ELSA-M mission. He said Astroscale estimates that seven to eight percent of OneWeb satellites cannot be deorbited on their own, which would require services at a cost of $8 million to $13 million apiece, or total revenue of up to $585 million.

Chris Blackerby, Astroscale’s chief operating officer, noted in the briefing that consulting firm NSR estimated the total market for on-orbit services over the next decade at $3.1 billion in a 2020 study, but that rose to $18.2 billion in its most recent report earlier this year. “At Astroscale, we’re targeting over 50% market share,” he said.

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