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New space missions, both commercial and for exploration are launched quite frequently leaving spent stages or damaged equipment orbiting the earth. Recently, China created the largest orbiting debri cloud ever when they tested their satellite capable of destroying other satellites. Decommissioned satellites also contribute to space junk. So that begs the question, how are we going to clean up this huge orbiting mess? A good start would be to require commercial rockets to be equipped with remote control cores and be staged while they still have enough fuel to be de-orbited. That would slow the build up of space junk, but cleaning up our current space junk would require something similar to an orbiter with a lot of fuel and cargo capacity. The orbiter could rendezvous with large pieces of space junk and attach small solid rockets to de-orbit them. The orbiter could also use a claw to grab space junk and place it in the cargo bay. Another option would be to use a small pod equipped with an electromagnet and launched from a medium sized rocket. Once in orbit and in a large cloud of smaller space debris the pod's electromagnet could engage and once the debris was secured to the pod the entire pod could be re-entered incinerating the space debris. Both of these options would be relatively expensive and would likely need to be enforced by an international space counsel. So the question is, what will we do about the space junk problem? I'd be interested to hear your responses.
