Solving the Space Junk Crisis Isn't Just About Counting Trash—It’s About Control and Economics

If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn’t work that way, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who we typically cover for his work on the Solar Gravitational Lens idea, makes a good argument as to why.