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Comment by shantara | Hacker News Reader

What is their business model? This is far from first space debris cleanup company, but regardless of their technical capabilities, all of them are useless until the regulations introduce a requirement for the launch providers and satellite owners to clean their mess.

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Lobby for pigouvian taxes on the creators of space junk and contract to fix the problem, getting paid out of that fund?

I googled it so you do not have to...:

"A Pigovian (Pigouvian) tax is a tax assessed against private individuals or businesses for engaging in activities that create adverse side effects for society."

Presumably, government contracting.

Your satellite crashes? Pay us to clean it up.

or don't, and leave it there?

You'll be sued for domino effect that crashed everything?

But seriously, I have no idea how cleaning operations will look like. There are tens of thousands small piecies flying around at high speed. Every time I think about it my brain gives back cartoon scenes only as solution to cleanups.

Why would I pay a cleaning company instead of spending a lot less money on moving the satellite into a graveyard orbit before it runs out of propellant?

Because accidents will start to become more common, and the more stuff we keep putting up there, more often they will occur.

Given that the largest source of man-made debris is Chinese, I don't see that happening.

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