US Space Force Wants to Fund 'Space Junk'-Cleaning Startups

America's Department of Defense "wants to clean up space...at least the increasingly polluted region in low Earth orbit, where thousands of bits of debris, spent rocket stages and dead satellites whiz uncontrollably," writes the Washington Post. They're reporting that America's Space Force has now launched a program to give companies seed money to develop space-cleaning technology to eventually demo in space (starting with awards of $250,000 that rise as high as $1.5 million). The name of the program: Orbital Prime. The issue also has gotten the attention of the White House. Its Office of Science and Technology Policy recently held a meeting asking for input from space industry leaders about what to do about the problem. Speaker after speaker said that governments around the world need to fund these efforts to help create a market for companies to operate. They also said that it had become an imperative for the governments largely responsible for the problem in the first place. "If the U.S. Navy had had a derelict ship sitting in sovereign waters, creating a safety hazard, the U.S. Navy would go out and grab that ship," said Doug Loverro, a former top Pentagon and NASA space official. "And I'm not sure why we don't see the same responsibility for government for their derelict ships and their derelict bodies that are in space today." Or as James Lowenthal, a professor of astronomy at Smith College in Michigan, put it: "Just as we rely on the government to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, we have to rely on the government to protect the resource and the global commons of low Earth orbit." Europe and Britain have also begun to work toward cleaning up debris - a move that's long overdue, space industry experts say. ClearSpace, a Swiss company, has a contract with the European Space Agency to remove a large piece of debris - a symbol that the issue is finally being addressed. It proposes using a spacecraft with large arms that would grapple the debris like a Venus' flytrap. "This is why we're here. Because we think change is possible," said Luc Piguet, ClearSpace's co-founder and CEO. "And we think we can build a space industry that operates with a different model, where maintenance is just a normal part of it." "This debris and associated congestion threaten the longer sustainability of the space domain," said Space Force's vice chief of space operations, in a video advertising the seed-money program, adding that America's Department of Defense tracks 40,000 objects in orbit the size of a fist or larger, with at least 10 times as many smaller objects the Pentagon can't reliably track.

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