Today: 16 November 2025
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Space Junk

Space Junk Gold Rush: Inside the 2025–2032 Race to Clean Up Earth’s Orbit and Cash In on Sustainability

Space Junk Cleanup Breakthrough: Ion Engine Exhaust Could Blast Debris Out of Orbit

The Ion Engine Exhaust Method: Blasting Debris with Plasma In this novel concept, a cleanup satellite approaches a piece of orbital debris and fires a stream of plasma (electrically charged gas) from an ion thruster to gradually slow the object’s orbital speed space.com. Slowing an object causes its orbit to decay; eventually it reenters the atmosphere and burns up harmlessly. The key innovation by Kazunori Takahashi of Tohoku University is a bi-directional plasma thruster that solves a fundamental problem: when you shoot an ion beam one way, Newton’s third law pushes your spacecraft the opposite way space.com. Takahashi’s design mounts
16 September 2025
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EU Declares War on Space Junk: A Deep Dive into the New Space Act, the Starlink Dilemma and the Hidden Climate Costs of Orbital Debris

EU Declares War on Space Junk: A Deep Dive into the New Space Act, the Starlink Dilemma and the Hidden Climate Costs of Orbital Debris

The EU Space Act was presented on 25 June 2025 and would impose EU-wide rules on launch licensing, debris-mitigation, end-of-life disposal, cybersecurity and environmental impact, with fines up to 2% of global turnover. If approved, most provisions would apply from 2030, including special traffic-coordination duties for mega (100+) and giga (1,000+) constellations. The debris crisis features about 40,000 tracked objects orbiting Earth and more than 1.2 million pieces larger than 1 cm, with at least 3,000 new debris fragments created in 2024. Starlink has launched 7,578 satellites, of which 7,556 were operational as of 30 May 2025. SpaceX logged over
25 June 2025
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Space Junk Gold Rush: Inside the 2025–2032 Race to Clean Up Earth’s Orbit and Cash In on Sustainability

Space Junk Gold Rush: Inside the 2025–2032 Race to Clean Up Earth’s Orbit and Cash In on Sustainability

Over 32,000 debris objects are regularly tracked, with an estimated 130+ million fragments too small to track, and a 1-centimeter piece can disable a satellite. The International Space Station has performed nearly 40 evasive maneuvers to dodge debris. Kessler Syndrome describes a self-sustaining cascade of collisions that could render portions of orbit unusable. In 2007, China’s anti-satellite test created over 3,000 trackable fragments, and in 2009 a collision between a U.S. Iridium satellite and a dead Russian Kosmos satellite generated another large debris field. There are over 9,000 active satellites in orbit as of 2023, with forecasts of 20,000 to
19 June 2025
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