Non-Cooperative Satellite Capture

Space Is Building Disposal Capability Faster Than It's Building Disposal Rules

A discarded rocket stage hit the Moon this week. It’s a harmless impact today only because there’s nothing up there yet worth protecting, and that’s about to stop being true. In the same stretch of news, two U.S. defense agencies started paying three companies to study how to grab dead satellites out of orbit, and a Portuguese space-safety company partnered with a Belgian sensor maker to see debris that’s currently invisible to almost everyone tracking it. None of the three stories mention each other. Put next to each other, they’re describing one industry getting serious about cleanup work faster than it’s writing any rules for how that cleanup is actually supposed to happen.