Cleaning Up Space

I touch on the issue of space junk in my novel, China Rising. There are over three thousand dead satellites orbiting the planet and approximately thirty-four thousand pieces of debris larger than four inches. The smaller the debris you measure, the more of it there is. The paradoxical problem with cleaning up this cloud of debris is both the sheer quantity of junk and how far apart all of it is. Oh, and it’s flying around the earth at speeds in excess of 18,000 mph.

A company called Astroscale is the first private firm with a vision to secure the safe and sustainable development of space for the benefit of future generations. They were founded in 2013 and operate out of an office in Tokyo. Founder and CEO Nobu Okada started the company with his own money and still leads this team of “space sweepers.”

On March 22nd, 2021, they will launch ELSA-d, which will hopefully be their first satellite to reach orbit. The End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration mission (Elsa-d) is a small satellite designed to find an unwanted satellite, intercept it, clamp on, and then push it into the Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up.

This problem, and the desire to clean it up, isn’t unique to space. A young man named Boyan Slat gave a Ted Talk in 2012 (he was just eighteen years old) with a unique proposal to clean the five ocean gyres. These slow moving whirlpools pull in and collect garbage in large patches of ocean, trapping the waste. Since that first presentation, he has gone on to found The Ocean Cleanup Project and has implemented solutions to clean the world’s waterways.

As I often do when I look for ideas for my novels, I looked at these technologies through the lens of “how could a nation-state weaponize this?” In a few reviews people commented that they enjoyed my novel, China Rising, but found some of the technology to be unbelievable. Tomorrow, at least one of those technologies will be a reality.