1. The discipline of one page

Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain opens with a government project called Wildfire, defined by a tight charter, a specific trigger, and a finite team. The project exists because someone wrote down exactly what it was supposed to do. The keeper demo needs the same treatment. After six entries of wandering, it is time to compress the idea into one page.

One page is not a gimmick. It is a test. If the mission cannot be explained on one page, the team does not understand it well enough to build it.

2. The one-page concept

Title. Keeper Demo-1: contact with a spent upper stage in low Earth orbit.

Objective. Demonstrate rendezvous, proximity operations, and controlled contact with a non-cooperative object, using a small, rideshare-class servicer.

Target. A spent Falcon 9 second stage, Centaur, or similar object in LEO, with slow tumble and reliable tracking.

Spacecraft. ~70 kg dry mass, ~90 kg wet mass. Bus, power, avionics, camera/lidar navigation, cold-gas propulsion, and a lightweight capture interface.

Mission. Launch as rideshare. Perform phasing and approach. Close to within contact range using onboard relative navigation. Touch the target, record contact dynamics, and either release or attach a passive marker. Downlink data and back away.

Duration. Two years from contract to contact.

Cost. Approximately $7–13M, including launch, bus, payload, integration, test, and operations.

Customer. A space agency technology demonstration office, with possible defense or commercial co-funding.

Success criteria. Successful rendezvous, safe contact, and validated telemetry. Failure is defined as inability to approach or contact without causing debris.

What it proves. The core competences needed for future keeper operations: finding, tracking, approaching, and touching objects in orbit.

3. What is deliberately left out

The concept does not include deorbit, sample return, orbital modification, or a second object. It does not promise science data beyond engineering telemetry. It does not claim to advance asteroid capture directly. These omissions are the point. The demo is a single step, not a staircase.

4. What would make this page better

A real one-pager would include a specific target catalog number, a launch window, and a named rideshare opportunity. It would name the bus vendor and the ground station network. It would list the three biggest technical risks and the tests that retire them. This version is a template. The next version should be a contract.

What this changes

  • The keeper demo now has a compact, shareable summary that can be handed to a potential funder or reviewer.
  • The scope is explicitly bounded: touch, record, and retreat.
  • The one-page format exposes what is still missing: target selection, vendor selection, and risk retirement.
  • The next leisure entry can identify the three most important risks in this concept and how to reduce them before anyone writes a check.