Economics could solve it, if orbital manufacturing finds it cheaper to collect space junk for raw material than to boost it to orbit or mine it from asteroids. If we can defer it long enough to get to that stage an incipient orbital buzz saw may have a silver lining.
People are focusing on the technical challenge, but there's a deeper issue with this idea: using mining is solving the problem "by side-effect."
The way economics is supposed to solve this sort of problem is via liability (and probably insurance). This doesn't require solving the space mining problem, just an actuarial problem.
But of course, the problem is that certain international actors wouldn't accept any sort of rules-based accountability for damage when it's caused by their space junk.
Yup, just like the problem with plastics is "solved" by recycling, which only manages to handle a fraction of the plastic generated, doesn't address microplastic pollution, and the economic viability of recycling is incredibly poor, in part because the polymers break down quite a bit with use/age/reprocessing.
Plastics, climate change, we have a number of these problems that get worse over a long enough time scales that there is no incentive for the people in charge of our economy to fundamentally change their behavior. I find "economics will solve this" arguments really dubious.
What OP is talking about is internalizing externalities. In the case of plastics this would presumably involve making companies that manufacture plastics bear the costs of disposing of them.
While it's true that plastics recycling is mostly a joke, in most places, companies manufacturing plastics aren't required to bear the cost of recycling in the first place (i.e. there has been no attempt to internalize the externalities in the first place), so I'm not sure it's even possible to invoke plastics recycling as a counterexample.
If there had been a push to make plastics manufacturers bear the cost of recycling, then the fact that recycling doesn't adequately cover the full externalities might be an example of the problems with this process (certainly there is an incentive for companies to try to downplay the negative externalities resulting from their products if they will be forced to bear the cost of dealing with those externalities).
The real way to make this process work would probably just be to tax plastics heavily based on their negative externalities and use that money to dispose of them.
However, this would likely make goods using plastics prohibitively expensive for consumers, so it might be unpopular, but it would likely cause people to use alternative materials that are more expensive than plastics are currently, which would be beneficial.
OP here, IMO the most feasible implementation of a tax-to-disposal scheme is probably universal plastic deposits. Deposits have historically proven to be a highly effective and efficient policy, one that Keep America Beautiful (the original polluter greenwashing[0] group!) naturally fiercely opposes.
Even if they only kept up with inflation, bottle deposits would be at least 25¢ today. The federal government should treat the microplastic tsunami like it did the hazard of drunk driving: tie federal highway funding to states adoption of universal plastic deposit laws.
In California you pay an extra deposit when you buy a plastic bottle. I don’t know if that number is set to properly capture the externality, but it’s enough to get people wandering the streets to pick up the bottles and turn them in (they even rifle through your trash can). Also, it doesn’t apply to most forms of plastic packaging or goods.
Recycling works great for lots of resources: lead-acid batteries, steel, aluminum, etc. Just because it doesn't work well for one resource doesn't make it non-viable.
Liability can be quite a problem when the original entity collapses or thoroughly transforms itself. A possible development for both corporations and nation states.
This is already a major problem with long-tail risk activities (industrial plants, mines, oil wells) or those with numerous small operators (shipping, itself the origin of the modern insurance industry). Established operators sell off or otherwise divest high-risk operations, units, vessels, etc., to smaller entities which can extract remaining value then walk away from the ultimate costs.
Add in to this problems of international law (and its even more problematic variants, marine and aerospace law), and you've got problems poorly addressed by market-bases solutions.
It is not always cheap to change orbit around Earth, the old Heinlein quote:
"If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere."
is mostly wrong. If you wanted to send up a satellite to pick up little bits of trash and bring them to one place for processing you would have to use fuel to maneuver from one to another: it is cheap to change the
but other orbit changes in LEO can be about as expensive as launching a rocket up from Earth. There is no point, for instance, in sending a cargo to the space station and then launching it in a polar orbit. The space station we have has no potential as a staging area to go to the Moon or Mars because it is in the wrong orbit. The cost of moving things around is one reason why Terra is the low-cost source of resources throughout the solar system still.
Now you can move space junk around without using fuel, instead you can hit the space junk with a laser which will evaporate off a bit of the surface and push it:
the usual idea is that you use this to deorbit space junk but you could also use this to change the orbit of a piece so maybe you could gather a bunch of them in one place or maybe somebody could use such a laser to engineer collisions. The laser they describe in that paper is almost like a tractor or pressor beam from science fiction.
I'm pretty sure that collecting objects from a field of debris where every object is moving at speeds of up to 30,000 km/h relative to other objects, in random directions, is much more of a scientific challenge before even looking at economic incentives for it.
Exactly. People forget (or simply don't know) that orbital plane changes are incredibly expensive from an energy perspective. It's not like you're walking down the road picking up trash in a row, you have to adjust your orbit, canceling out movement in one direction while adding movement in another. And it takes an incredible amount of energy even for minor plane changes.
Falcon 9 can put 17.4 t to LEO (demonstrated with a 2023 Starlink launch) for ~$20 million (estimated SpaceX cost, not retail price) which is closer to $1.15/g.
Again, that's cost not price. That's what the state of the art can do in a best case, but probably highly repeatable and reliable scenario, today.
No point to looking up the current exact price, nor payload, when removing orbital junk is multi-million-dollar ante game, and state-of-the-art is "a few engineering prototypes exist". The bottom line (that we're many orders of magnitude away from economically recovering small space junk as raw material) would be true whether the cost of launch was $20/g or $0.20/g.
