Objects in space are merticuously tracked. It would be very hard to get away with something like that, and none of the relevant fliers would dare bet their business on trying.
To be clear, I'm not saying OP is wrong, it would probably work out fine. But this seems like a fun angle to consider.
> You can just put the same price on debris addition.
Indeed. A small tax that matches the cost of debris capture payment + minor administrative overhead would encourage the outcome that junk isn't thrown into unrecoverable orbit.
I can't even find their account https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xboneslife
Wonder what happened...
I went to reply to the user, then got a "comment deleted" error. First time I've seen that on HN.
If that fee is the entire estimated near-term cost to recover the object, it would also create incentives for entities putting large amounts of mass in orbit to focus on improved strategies for removal: if removal becomes lower cost than the fee, it's worth paying someone to recover your debris if a satellite fails in order to recover the fee.
The govt can include the cleanup cost as part of the launch licensing cost.
It also created an insane amount of junk in a high orbit that won't deorbit any time soon.