A growing class of startups is finding its next billion‑dollar opportunity in the Earth’s orbit. Decades of satellite launches have left behind tens of thousands of pieces of debris, threatening everything from GPS and weather systems to national security. As the problem worsens, “space janitor” companies are stepping in with technologies to track, capture, and remove orbital junk. Once an afterthought, orbital cleanup is now a serious business as governments, insurers, and satellite operators confront the cost of collisions.

In this article you’ll learn:

In this article you’ll learn: • 

BY CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER

Decades of debris have created a dangerous problem—and a lucrative opportunity.

Space may be the final frontier, as someone famously once said—but it’s also getting pretty crowded. That will be even more true if Elon Musk’s idea to put data centers in space actually comes to fruition.

Superfast internet, satellite TV technology and your proclivity to need to know where you are at all times all depend on orbital satellites. A space spat between Musk’s SpaceX (who recently applied to throw up a million data center satellites into orbit) and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin (which has also asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for permission to put 51,600 gizmos up there, too), means Earth’s orbit is getting even more crowded.

That’s on top of an already record-breaking volume of objects already launched in the last year. More than 4,500 objects went into space in 2025, according to analysts Apollo Academy, up from just 600 in 2019

“In a short amount of time—six years—we’ve launched more than five times as many operational satellites than we used to have in orbit,” says Hugh Lewis, professor of astronautics in the space environment at the University of Birmingham, U.K. While business is booming, it’s getting pretty crowded.

A Looming Disaster

The European Space Agency (ESA) has warned , cautioning that the volume of launches is resulting in a bigger volume of space debris than expected that could cause issues.

The FCC has also recognized the risk, and in 2022 instigated a new rule that required operators that put stuff up into space to bring it down five years after the mission completed. “This is already a huge problem that’s costing satellite operators millions of dollars every year, not just through collision avoidance manuvers, but actually by being hit by debris,” says Harrison Box, founder of Paladin Space, which developed that it calls the world’s first reusable space debris removal payload called Triton.

Box points out that SpaceX, for instance, like other satellite providers, makes hundreds of moves a day to its satellites in order to avoid collisions. That’s not necessarily to duck and dodge operating satellites, but long-expired ones that remain in orbit because it’s tricky and costly to bring them back down to Earth and out of harm’s way.

Between 3,000 and 4,000 defunct satellites are still in orbit long after their best use date, according to SatFleet Live, a tracking website. That’s around a quarter of all the active satellites up in space.

The reason to remove unused items from orbit is to avoid the Kessler effect—a little-known scientific worry that one collision between satellites could cause vast volumes of debris to scatter, which then could set off a trigger reaction of yet more collisions and damages. “You can generate a cloud of thousands of fragments from just one collision,” says Lewis. “And each one of those fragments has the potential to either disable or to catastrophically break up another intact object in orbit.”

Lewis says that his research indicates we’re reaching a point where catastrophe is just around the corner if something isn’t done. And significant action is needed to shift the issue. “We’re not going to solve the problem with just one or two removals at all,” he says. “We’re moving towards a scenario where almost for every satellite we put up, we have to bring one down, or even more than that.”

Paladin is one of a range of companies trying different methods to try and wrangle space debris when it’s finished its useful lifespan. Others include the early-stage startup Space Cowboy, based in Austin, Texas and founded by a U.S. Army veteran, which plans to launch Capture and Arrest Mechanisms (CAMs)—effectively a washing machine-sized vehicle that would launch into lower earth orbit and collect tiny fragments of debris between 1 and 10 centimeters big before it causes meaningful damage. (Space Cowboy did not respond to multiple interview requests.)

It all matters because tiny objects can have a big impact. “Even the smallest piece of debris from one centimeter of aluminum in space is about the same equivalent energy of a landmine,” says Box, who says that in his conversations with defense experts, they don’t see it as debris. “They see it as a threat.”

ClearSpace, a European-backed alternative, plans to launch its first test flight into space in 2028. Others have more out-there approaches to trying to tackle the issue: U.K. startup Astroscale signed a deal with Japan’s equivalent of NASA for its ADRAS-J2 project, which would approach a now-unused object floating in space, capture it with a robot arm, and drag it down to the Earth’s atmosphere, where the high temperatures would burn it up safely.

That doesn’t come without its issues: “that is a process which we’ve started to see is causing pollution in the atmosphere, which could have quite a significant effect.” That includes on the environment thanks to the release of ozone-destroying chemicals.

Paladin offers an alternative. Rather than picking off one piece of space trash at a time, it aims to collect a whole lot and get rid of it safely. “Imagine a trash can that’s attached to a satellite,” says Box, describing his Triton space waste disposal unit.

That approach, Box argues, is necessary because the risks are rising fast. “In the past,” he says, operators could go 160 days without having to move a spacecraft to avoid a collision. “Now that time is about three days,” he says. “If we leave this longer, it’s going to become a minefield up there.”

Paladin says it wants to get Triton into orbit in 2027, after building a space-grade version and testing it on the International Space Station. Longer term, Box imagines something more ambitious than simply taking out the orbital trash. “At the moment, we’re collecting debris,” he says, “but soon we want to be able to feed that into recycling stations” and eventually use the material for manufacturing in orbit. But for now, he insists, the immediate task is simpler: clear the junk before space becomes too dangerous—and too expensive—to use.