There’s a collective illusion we’ve all carried since childhood, that the sky is clean, calm, and endlessly serene. In reality, if humans could see what’s actually floating above us, we’d probably look up with the same uneasy feeling we get when opening a storage room full of dusty, random objects we swore we would “organize someday.” And these aren’t just ordinary bits of junk, they are leftovers of past space missions—once proud and majestic, now aimlessly drifting like exes who refuse to exit your WhatsApp memories.
This cosmic mess is dissected seriously in a study titled Space Logistics Analysis and Incentive Design for Commercialization of Orbital Debris Remediation. The research was published on October 5, 2025 in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, authored by Asaad Abdul-Hamid, Brycen D. Pearl, Hang Woon Lee, and Hao Chen. Yes, the title sounds like a new model of industrial printer, but the content matters: how humanity can clean up space junk and turn it into a profitable business. Because apparently, even outer-space trash needs to find its place in capitalism.
A Sky Full of Scrap Metal
Let’s start with something dramatic. Imagine a refrigerator-sized satellite zooming at 27,000 km/h suddenly hit by a marble-sized piece of metal. The outcome? Something equivalent to a car slamming into a concrete wall with turbo—obliterated, fragmented, and leaving the orbit even messier than before. This is exactly the concern of Hao Chen, one of the researchers.
Chen stresses that space debris is not some sci-fi exaggeration. “One collision could trigger another and another, creating a destructive chain reaction,” he notes.
This nightmare scenario could disrupt global communication networks, knock out GPS systems, and send humanity back to a time when finding a friend’s house required memorizing directions based on trees, rivers, and warung mie ayam.
Chen also points out a very human problem: no incentives. There’s no strict international law that holds space companies accountable for the junk they leave behind. Everyone races to launch satellites, but when those satellites break, die, or retire, many are left drifting like unresolved emotional baggage.
“If there’s no financial benefit or legal pressure, who would spend millions just to clean up old hardware?” he argues. This feels a lot like our environmental habits on Earth: everyone “cares,” right up until they’re asked to pay.
Turning Space Trash Into Profit
While Chen focuses on danger, Brycen D. Pearl brings a more optimistic view. Space trash can actually become a business. Pearl is one of the minds behind combining space logistics with game theory—a framework designed to make orbital cleaning operations logical, efficient, and most importantly, economically attractive.
According to Pearl, companies could benefit financially from participating in orbital cleanup. “Space debris isn’t just a shared problem—it’s a shared responsibility with shared potential profit,” he suggests.
The team created models to calculate mission costs, optimal cleanup routes, and how satellite operators and cleanup providers could split the expenses and revenue.
The idea is simple: satellite operators get safer orbits, cleanup companies get paid, and regulators get fewer headaches. It’s basically a cosmic version of modern waste management: some people throw away trash, some transport it, some recycle it, and everyone in the value chain gets paid. Pearl’s goal is to design a system where cleaning orbit isn’t just a noble environmental act—it’s a routine industry fueled by incentives.
And honestly, it makes sense. If you want humans to do something consistently, don’t rely on moral duty—attach a financial reward. Pearl’s approach recognizes a basic truth: people clean more reliably when there’s money involved.
Space Junk A Global Problem
The sad truth humanity keeps proving is this: moral awareness alone cannot clean anything, not rivers, not forests, not oceans. So it’s no surprise that researchers are thinking about more realistic approaches, turning orbital cleanup into a full-blown industry.
This doesn’t eliminate the environmental value. In fact, industrializing cleanup gives the effort its own economic momentum. Without it, Earth’s orbit might soon resemble a parking lot full of abandoned vehicles—except the vehicles are dead satellites, rocket fragments, stray bolts, and loose flakes of paint.
We also need to remember, orbit isn’t like landfills or oceans. You can’t expand it. The space is limited. If it gets crowded, it’s crowded. The more crowded it is, the higher the risk of collisions, and the more likely humanity loses access to the very technology we depend on—weather monitoring, navigation, emergency communication, satellite TV, and Netflix via satellite internet. Imagine living without GPS. Big cities would collapse into chaos. People in big cities might have to learn how to read physical maps again, which feels more sci-fi than the space debris problem itself.
Space isn’t a tidy void, it’s cluttered to a worrying degree. According to estimates from space agencies, there are tens of thousands of debris objects larger than about 10 centimeters orbiting Earth—objects large enough to be tracked using radar and telescopes. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When we zoom in to smaller pieces, the situation gets wild, there could be over 1 million pieces between 1 and 10 centimeters, and an astonishing tens of millions to hundreds of millions of fragments smaller than 1 centimeter whizzing around our planet at hypersonic speeds. Many of these smaller but still dangerous fragments are too tiny to track reliably but still carry enough energy to damage or destroy satellites. (Wage Erlangga)
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