Orbital Landfills: The Multibillion-Dollar Question of Who Cleans Up Space

Sixty miles above Kansas, traveling at nearly 18,000 miles per hour, a Soviet communications satellite launched during the Carter administration circles the planet with no propulsion, no owner capable of retrieving it, and no legal mechanism compelling anyone to remove it. It is one of roughly 12,000 dead satellites sharing the sky with humanity's active constellation—and a quiet emblem of a problem the space economy has been content to defer.

That deferral is ending. Low Earth orbit, once an almost empty frontier, is now the most contested real estate off-planet, and the debris accumulating within it poses a genuine threat to the satellite infrastructure that underpins American banking, GPS, weather forecasting, and defense. The question is no longer whether orbit needs cleaning, but who pays for it—and who gets to set the rules.

A Junkyard Built by Everyone, Owned by No One

The legal architecture governing orbital debris traces back to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, a Cold War-era document that predates the commercial space age by half a century. Under the treaty and subsequent UN conventions, launching states retain jurisdiction over objects they register in orbit, indefinitely. A defunct satellite belongs to its country of origin forever—meaning an American company cannot simply capture and deorbit a derelict Russian rocket body without permission from Moscow.

This creates what scholars call an orphan problem: thousands of objects technically owned by entities that no longer exist, no longer operate, or no longer have any incentive to act. Liability conventions assign fault for damage caused by debris, but fault is nearly impossible to prove when a collision involves fragments too small to track back to a source. The 2009 collision between an active Iridium satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos spacecraft—producing over 2,300 tracked fragments—illustrated how quickly liability dissolves into ambiguity.

Meanwhile, the launch tempo has exploded. Commercial constellations like SpaceX's Starlink have multiplied the number of active satellites in LEO from roughly 1,500 a decade ago to well over 9,000 today, with tens of thousands more licensed. Every launch carries debris risk. Every collision generates more debris, which raises the probability of further collisions—a cascade scenario known as Kessler syndrome, in which orbital regions become self-sustaining junk fields, unusable for generations.

The Rise of the Space Janitors

Into this gray zone has stepped a small but rapidly professionalizing industry built on a simple premise: someone will eventually pay to remove debris, and the company that demonstrates the capability first will define the market.

Tokyo-based Astroscale has emerged as the sector's most visible player, and its US subsidiary, Astroscale US, is headquartered in Colorado—a deliberate signal of where it sees its customer base. The company has already demonstrated magnetic capture technology in orbit, docking with a test object and demonstrating the core maneuver a cleanup mission would require. Its ELSA-d mission proved the concept; subsequent contracts with national space agencies aim to turn demonstration into routine service.

Other American players are advancing parallel approaches. Northrop Grumman's MEV missions have already docked with aging satellites in geostationary orbit—extending their lives rather than removing them, but proving that orbital rendezvous and servicing is commercially viable. Startups like Kall Morris Inc. in Michigan are developing robotic arms and capture mechanisms designed for debris removal specifically. Even DARPA has funded orbital servicing programs, reflecting Pentagon interest in a capability that is equal parts janitorial and strategic.

The economics remain unproven. Cleanup missions cost tens of millions of dollars, and no international fund or fee structure exists to finance them. Today's revenue comes largely from government contracts and insurance-adjacent services. The industry's bet is that regulation—fees on launches, disposal bonds, or mandated deorbit requirements—will eventually convert a moral hazard into a market.

Why the United States Should Write the Rules

Historically, international coordination in orbit has moved at glacial speed. The UN's Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines are voluntary. The FCC's new five-year deorbit rule for LEO satellites—replacing the previous 25-year standard—is the most aggressive national policy in the world, but it applies only to US-licensed operators, covering a fraction of the debris problem.

This is precisely why American leadership matters. The United States licenses the majority of the world's commercial satellites, hosts the dominant constellation operators, and maintains the deepest space insurance and finance markets. If Washington builds a cleanup framework—disposal surety bonds, active debris removal procurement, debris removal tax incentives, and bilateral agreements with major launching states—it effectively sets the global default, much as it did with commercial aviation standards.

There is also a strategic dimension. Debris removal technology is indistinguishable from orbital servicing technology, which is indistinguishable from satellite inspection and, in adversarial hands, satellite interference. The country that normalizes responsible on-orbit operations shapes the norms under which all future orbital activity occurs. Ceding that role invites others to write less transparent rules.

The Window Is Closing, Slowly

Orbit is not yet unusable. But debris models suggest certain altitude bands are already past the threshold where natural atmospheric drag will clean them within a human lifetime. Every year of inaction adds cost and risk to a cleanup bill that will, eventually, come due—paid either through deliberate investment or through the loss of the orbital infrastructure modern life quietly depends upon.

The satellites already up there were launched by governments and companies that profited from orbit without accounting for its maintenance. The emerging cleanup industry has made the problem solvable. What remains is the harder task: building the ownership, liability, and financing framework that turns a shared liability into shared infrastructure. The longer that work waits, the more the sky above becomes a landfill that no one—by design—has to clean.