Every once in a while, we hear a story of some sort of trash nugget from an airplane or defunct space equipment falling in someone’s yard or even on a house. In March 2024, a piece of metal International Space Station trash crashed through a Florida roof. The station ejected the debris back in 2021, with scientists expecting the garbage to burn up during reentry into the atmosphere. Experts have already warned that these incidents could become more of an issue as time passes, especially considering that various entities worldwide release about 50 satellites into orbit every week.

Old satellites and other space debris pose an increasing risk to communications, transportation, and financial systems.

I’m sure y’all have seen those grim images of the floating dumps out in the middle of the ocean? Well, that’s becoming an image of orbital space, too.

Every time something orbiting Earth crashes into another object floating around, it creates additional debris. With 35,000 pieces of garbage orbiting the planet – and counting – a collision with an active, increasingly essential satellite is a higher and higher risk. A good example is SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which more and more people rely on for internet service.

The risks also include acts of war, via weapons meant to destroy active satellites in low orbit. Any debris created by damaged satellites measuring larger than 1 cm can pose huge threats to other active, low-orbiting equipment.

So why is there so much space trash allowed to be up there? Well, it isn’t “supposed” to be there…but there’s only so much teams can do to prevent more debris from accumulating. Typically, once a satellite is of retirement age, controllers use the last bit of fuel to move it somewhere “safe.” This can include reentering into the atmosphere with the intention on fully burning it up.

Other times, if the satellite is already on the “outer functioning edge,” the owners will use its remaining fuel to propel it even farther out. It’s called the “graveyard orbit,” where defunct equipment can exist safely out of the way of objects in use.

However, these aren’t perfect methods…case in point, those 35K bits of space debris lingering above us.

Unfortunately, clearing orbital junk doesn’t make financial sense.

A Swiss start-up, ClearSpace, is setting up its first mission. It teamed up with Swiss watchmaker Omega and is working to launch a satellite recovery effort. By 2028, ClearSpace hopes to go and fetch Proba-1, a European Space Agency craft.

ClearSPace Mission-1 plans to envelope the craft and gently slow it down before pointing it toward the atmosphere. It should then burn up in the South Pacific Ocean, CNBC shared.

Sounds positive enough. The kicker? The mission’s single craft recovery budget is 120 million euros, or about 123 million U.S. dollars.

The European Space Agency is providing 86 million euros for the mission. You might understand, then, why private, space-interested companies aren’t enthusiastically cleaning up their garbage.

Engineers will have to better address defunct satellites and space trash.

I’d like to hope that big space players are increasingly including the growing amount of space debris in their designs and innovations.

To address the 35,000 pieces of debris already out there, some entity will have to invent and launch a “low-cost” cleanup craft that hangs out in space, collects the debris, and points it back into Earth’s atmosphere.

Perhaps all of the active players in space will have to pay a trash collection fee to help fund sanitation and safety efforts.

In any case, not all debris that renters the atmosphere burns up entirely, so there might always be the risk of some piece of space junk landing on someone’s house.

Of course, these are complex problems, and not unlike waste management issues here on Earth.