As concerns grow about orbital debris and the need for space traffic management, cubesats without propulsion have no means to maneuver to avoid collisions or deorbit at the end of their operational lives.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...