About Us
Our team
Quinn McKemey
Co-Founder
Quinn McKemey is a finance professional and serves as a Legal Fellow and on the President's Legal Council at the National Space Society. Topics of research and advisement include orbital debris and space solar power. He received his Master in Business Administration and B.A. in Political Science from the University of Mississippi, where he is currently enrolled in the Graduate Certificate Program of Air & Space Law.
Eric Cremer
Co-Founder
Eric Cremer is a business professional with experience in aerospace engineering, startup management, marketing, and higher education. He is an angel investor in a plant-based foods business and is passionate about sustainability-focused entrepreneurship. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with an Aeronautical Concentration from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and is currently pursuing an M.S. in Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, where he studies topics such as orbital debris and the economics of cislunar propellant distribution.
Kwame Newton
Co-Founder
Kwame Newton is a member of the National Space Society’s Legal Advisory Council, where he advises the NSS President in matters relating to Space Economics, the Artemis Accords, and other emerging models for lunar governance. He holds a B.A. in Government and a B.A. in American Studies from Cornell, and graduated from Harvard Law School (J.D.) in 2020. After graduating, Kwame participated in space advocacy efforts like the Alliance for Space Development’s Citizen’s Space Agenda and the Space Generation Advisory Council’s Taskforce on US Legislation, and recently published a paper in New Space on the potential of the Artemis Accords as a driver of African space development.
Emma Schlenker
Marketing & Media
Emma Schlenker earned her B.A. in Public Relations with Political Science from Simpson College in 2019 and is currently studying at the University of Nebraska College of Law. In this role, she combines her training in communications and organizational development with her excitement for space, cyber, and telecommunications law.
Andrew Fulton
Marketing & Media
Andrew Fulton is a marketing professional with eight years of corporate experience, including four years in the marketing department of the Coca-Cola company. He holds an M.S. in Commercial Enterprise in Space from the Florida Institute of Technology.
Our Philosophy
We are Clean Orbit — a community-driven advocacy group emphasizing orbital debris removal. Our goal is simple. Advocate for the sustainable removal of space debris through educational outreach, fundraising, and the cultivation of a passionate community. With enough support, we believe we can impact change at the policy level and connect the public with promising opportunities to financially support up-and-coming research & development projects in the field.
Given the lack of regulatory, policy and financial backing for efforts related to active debris removal, Clean Orbit is uniquely positioned to engage concerned citizens that wish to protect our rapidly-developing orbital environment and help them take action to ensure its health and longevity. The proliferation of orbital debris is truly a tragedy of the commons, but as with other environmental challenges, we can affect massively positive change if we work together as an active community. We have founded Clean Orbit to lead in this effort.
There is a pressing need for policy change in orbital space: The UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space offers some debris mitigation guidelines, but they are not legally binding under international law. Regardless, NASA’s own internal report, issued by the Office of the Inspector General in January, 2021 found that “mitigation-only activities—focused solely on prevention—are not sufficient for stabilizing the orbital debris environment.”
Government policies and procedures to address our ever-crowded orbits are being continuously outpaced by emergent technologies and commercial ventures. The result is an orbital environment congested with new satellites, defunct hardware, and countless fragments of material debris.
The risk of orbital collisions and the challenges they pose to space operations are so great that the on-orbit insurance market is failing, meaning the cost of this risk is passed along to us — the consumers.
With more objects being launched into orbit this decade than in the past sixty years combined, the risk of launching and operating space hardware could soon outweigh the many benefits. The Kessler Syndrome was theorized in 1978, warning of a scenario in which objects in crowded orbits collide in rapid succession at hypervelocity, producing a self-sustaining, global cascade of collisions that could cut humanity off from space for generations. Over 40 years later, the dangers of this risk are more serious than ever before. With more spacecraft and debris collecting in orbit every year, this phenomenon poses a grave threat to technologies like weather monitoring, electronic payments, GPS, and communications services which are essential to modern human life.
To promote the sustainable use of space, Clean Orbit takes a three-pronged approach to debris advocacy:
EducatION
Educate the public through forums, town halls, and newsletters.
Advocacy
Advocate through community-driven activities for mitigation measures that limit the creation of additional debris such as enhanced post-mission disposal standards and categorization of space objects.
Remediation
Remediate the debris in Earth orbits by raising and directing funds to research and missions focused on removing defunct objects from orbit.
We are all consumers of space-based services, so we all have a choice to make: We can either pay to clean up our orbits now, or delay and risk losing our access to our digitally-connected, information-rich world entirely over the long term. The choice is clear for those who know the stakes, but public knowledge and engagement is far from sufficient to find a real solution.
We’ve seen what crowdfunding is capable of in industries and relief efforts around the world, and now is the time to apply the tools at our disposal to rid near-Earth orbits of debris, maintaining one of our greatest collective resources for the future.
