Your car breaks down, you call roadside assistance. Your satellite breaks down, it floats there. Forever.
There are roughly 16,000 satellites orbiting Earth, and the dead ones drift. They spin. They occasionally explode into clouds of debris that threaten every working satellite we depend on for GPS, weather forecasting and the Wi-Fi you’re using to read this.
Enter the world’s most expensive junk drawer, 250 miles above your head.
Meet ClearSpace, a startup building what is essentially a space tow truck. It tracks defunct satellites, matches their speed and orbit and grabs them with a robotic claw. Then drags them down to burn up in the atmosphere.
Someone finally decided to clean up the mess. Only took 60 years.