Growth Business Opportunity -- Be a Space Junkman

IN case you haven't heard, a couple of satellites -- one defunct, one working (which means it could have gotten out of the way if anyone had been paying ATTENTION -- collided last week. This has added to the load of space junk floating around in Earth orbit. The spreading cloud of high-tech fragments will eventually threaten the Space Station and it has now jeopardized the Hubble Space Telescope and its already-delayed final servicing mission.

D*mn. Well, read about it here:

The Problem of Space Junk

So clearly what's needed... is a garbage scow in space. They work in Baltimore's Inner Harbor:

So what is needed is the equivalent of a trash boat in space; floating around attracting and collecting junk to protect the valuable investments (multi-million dollar investments) up there. Furthermore, what's also needed is a wrecker; a utility satellite that goes up, gets a defunct satellite, and either a) fixes it, b) brings it back to Earth to get fixed, or c) boosts it Sunward or spaceward where it won't be a problem anymore (Sunward makes more sense and is probably a lot easier due to the gravity well).

Science fiction? It's been discussed. Once a couple more EXPENSIVE satellites go kerflooey when they get smashed into by a piece of scrap metal, nations and companies (not that either has any actual money these days) will start to pay more attention. Especially when thousands of people can't use their credit cards (not that anybody is actually doing much of that these days, either). And so I make this modest prediction: by 2020 there will be serious consideration of a space junk remediation mission. The first thing they'll do is target the defunct satellites and try to get them out of the way of the working ones; then they'll worry about the debris field.