Steve Wozniak's start-up Privateer develops ride-sharing spacecraft to reduce orbital clutter

Space start-up Privateer, co-founded by the famed Apple technologist Steve Wozniak, will begin orbital tests of its ride-sharing orbital module Pono in January.

The module, which launched on Dec. 1 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, was developed to encourage space users to share assets in order to reduce the growing amount of satellites and other orbital clutter around Earth.

"Just like we are trying to minimize single use plastics, we would like to minimize single-use satellites," space sustainability researcher and Privateer chief scientist Moriba Jah, told Space.com in an interview. "We don't have recyclable satellites yet. But with Pono, we have developed a package that can make satellites multi-use."

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Read Space.com's full coverage here.