Solving the space junk crisis isn't just about counting trash—it's about control and economics

If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites, then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn't work that way, and a new paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, available as a preprint on arXiv, makes a good argument as to why. We typically cover Turyshev for his work on the solar gravitational lens idea.