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The market for life‐extension services for GEO satellites is expected to remain healthy over the foreseeable future: over the last 20 years, an average of 22 new GEO satellites have been launched per year. In total, ClearSpace expects there will be 370 potential Client satellites that will reach their end of life due to the limited fuel they have remaining over the 2026‐2041 period. ClearSpace believes a strong market penetration rate is feasible, as more than 30% of all the potential satellites belong to just 7 satellite operators.

The design of a re-entry vehicle and the analysis of its performance are extremely challenging tasks. The difficulties increase when the understanding of its transient behaviour is sought and grow even further if this transient is affected by uncontrolled phenomena such as the shape change caused by the ablation of the thermal protection material used as heat shield.

A major challenge in the field of control is to achieve reliable, aggressive, high-speed control of autonomous vehicles. In space, this may involve spacecraft that need to land under harsh conditions, or even – in an extreme scenario – negotiating asteroid debris fields at high speeds. On Earth, the exemplar task that draws most attention currently is high-speed autonomous flight of drones. The application of optimal control on board limited platforms has been severely hindered by the large computational requirements of current state-of-the-art implementations.