Too much junk is flying around in space. Someone wants to fix that.

You can't see it from the ground, but there are thousands and thousands of pieces of space junk flying around in orbit in our skies and that's just the stuff that isn't doing anything anymore and to have this junk flying around in the sky is not safe either. The potential for one of these rogue pieces of space junk to slam into the International Space Station or an active satellite is not small. 

The opening plot sequence of the movie “Gravity” is based on this idea. 

Did You Know? 

Elon Musk's Starlink Internet space Internet Company has over 6000 satellites in orbit now with a plan for 10s of thousands more. How do you shoot anything into space without hitting a piece of space junk? 

Well, there's a new company that is trying to help mitigate this problem. The company is called Privateer, and it's cofounded by Steve Wozniak. (Recognize that name?) The goal is to use AI to help track and then return dead satellites. (There's a lot of them up there.)  

Yes, the amount of space junk is staggering and one of the reasons they like AI is because it helps them compute the orbits of all this space junk, even pieces of space junk down to four inches in diameter.  

So now they will know where the junk is and where it’s going but my question is, how do you get the junk out of that orbit?  

Most of this space junk is not smart. You can't just tell it to de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. So, what are they gonna' do? Send up another satellite that flits around to these other dead satellites and push them out of orbit? (I guess that could work.) I can't imagine that it would be cost effective to try to recycle them. (you tell me) 

Maybe we can get NASA to offer up a bounty to pay out to somebody enterprising enough to design that “janitor satellite”, put it up in the sky and put it to work. $10,000 per dead satellite removed would be a good bounty and probably make it worthwhile as an enterprise. 

I can't believe that somebody hasn't thought of this business model for space already. 

Maybe someone has and they're just not talking.  

U.S. Startup Wants to Clean Up Our Atmosphere by Using AI to Track and Get Rid of Defunct Satellites | Watch (msn.com)
Exclusive: Wozniak's space firm, Privateer, buys Orbital Insight, raises $56.5 million | Reuters
Home (privateer.com)