> "If you can decommission debris you can decommission satellites. This has obvious military applications. In fact to properly do this you actually have to get

> "If you can decommission debris you can decommission satellites. This has obvious military applications. In fact to properly do this you actually have to get pretty close to other satellites without colliding. By solving the debris problem you're solving a lot of the same problems you need for these military applications." I'm not sure that's entirely true. Having a collector satellite match orbit with the debris and grab is one way to get rid of it, but I suspect in most cases it's good enough to just position a satellite with, say, a big steel plate in a path that intersects the debris' path and deflect it at the right angle so it returns to Earth. (If you're really clever you might use the impacts to deflect the interceptor satellite into roughly the right orbit to intercept the next piece of debris.) There might also be ways to "catch" debris with moderately high relative velocity with the collector satellite. I imagine there's limits to the size of thing you can capture that way and the maximum relative velocity if you want to be pretty sure you can catch it without creating more debris. Maybe the least sophisticated way to deorbit debris would be to just have an object with relatively low mass but very high surface area (e.g. an artificial "asteroid" made of aerogel) in an orbit that gives it the greatest probability of hitting any average piece of space junk, and then you wait for things to hit it by chance. The things that hit it lose momentum and hopefully fall back to Earth.