The latest space race is to become the first galactic garbageman and clear up 6,000 tons of floating debris

The space race is filled with glamorous rockets, astronauts and sparkling new space stations, but people rarely think about all the junk from previous missions left orbiting the earth.As we prepare to fill our immediate galaxy with more satellites and even data centers, somebody’s got to become the interplanetary garbage man and hoover up all the discarded satellites and debris.Even tiny objects, such as something as small as a paint flake, can cause serious damage in orbit due to how quickly it travels — more than 17,000 miles per hour.“In the last seven decades we have launched roughly 20,000 objects into space, and now we’re talking about launching as many as one million satellites in just the next ten years,” said Dr.Chiranjeevi Phanindra, founder and CEO of Cosmoserve Space, which is preparing for its first launch of debris collecting technology to space as soon as next week.In total there are already more than 100 million pieces of debris larger than one millimeter in low Earth orbit circling the planet, according to NASA, weighing 6,000 tons.Until now space cleanup has largely been handled by governments, but a new FCC rule set to take full effect next year mandates private players to get involved.

The new regulation, implemented from 2027, requires operators to remove dead satellites from low-earth orbit within five years of the end of their missions — a significant tightening from a previous 25-year guideline.Companies which previously launched objects into orbit then forgot about them now need to find ways to remove their debris.And that creates a new commercial market, which could be worth $8 billion by 2030, Phanindra estimates.Different companies are pursuing different methods for collecting the debris.

Some are developing spacecraft designed to directly grab pieces of debris and bring it back to earth, others are working on giant nets to snare debris.Another method would involve shooting gas at the pieces to slow them down, causing them ...