Picking up the trash in space could be as easy as stuffing pieces of defunct spacecraft into a giant bag, closing it up, and tossing the pesky space junk into an orbital recycling plant. At least that’s what space startup TransAstra hopes to do with its inflatable capture bag.
Update: August 29, 8:13 a.m. ET: ULA announced last night through an emailed statement that the launch has been postponed indefinitely because of the approaching Hurricane Idalia, which was just recently upgraded from a tropical storm and is expected to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday morning. ULA also said in…
In a sad case of debris-on-debris crime, a defunct payload adapter that was chosen as the subject of a space debris cleanup mission was itself hit by a piece of space junk.
A groundbreaking demonstration by the European Space Agency (ESA) suggests it’s possible to deorbit satellites safely and in a reasonably controlled manner, even for those not originally designed for such maneuvers.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s space start-up Privateer aims to bring satellite access to the masses through a global online marketplace. Satellite-based data is primarily available to governments, but the company hopes to create a way for private citizens to share the cost of accessing a satellite, potentially…
Space companies and telecommunication providers are racing to litter the Earth’s skies with tens of thousands of new twinkling satellites capable of completing a vast variety of tasks, from research and internet communication to military espionage. Up until now, the security practices of these hefty floating…
ESA/ID&Sense/ONiRiXEL, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO