Space junk is a big problem, but no one wants to pay to fix it

Space junk is getting worse. Could the answer be smart plastic wrap?

That concept, being investigated by Aerospace Corp. of El Segundo, Calif., involves blasting thousands of tiny, flat spacecraft into orbit. They would find and hug bits and pieces of failed satellites and rockets, dragging them into the atmosphere to burn up.

There are more than 7,000 metric tons of material in near-Earth space, said J.C. Liou, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris. It can slam into a operating satellite or spacecraft at 6 miles per second - faster than a speeding bullet - which means even debris the size of a grain of sand could cause a catastrophe.

The problem is growing as more nations and private companies get into the launch business. And it has spurred a number of creative solutions, including a giant net that would scoop up space junk and setting off a bomb to knock it out of orbit.

Most don't get past the development stage; no one wants to pay for them.

A 2010 Rand Corp. study of orbital debris found that although the space community agreed space junk posed a risk, the lack of government and private industry funding to remove it suggested the "perception of risk" had not yet crossed a "critical threshold that would prompt demands for remediation."

In other words, it will take some expensive disasters to make it worth investing in a fix.

The technological challenges are daunting enough. Aaron Ridley, professor of space physics at the University of Michigan, encountered that in 2010, in his collaboration with Raytheon BBN Technologies on a NASA grant.

The idea was to fly a high-altitude balloon into the upper atmosphere and release a "substantial" amount of energy - basically detonating a bomb.

That energy would be channeled upward to increase the density of the atmosphere in a small, specific region where a piece of debris might travel. That was expected to give the junk more drag and force it to drop to where it would burn up, thus removing the debris without launching a costly rocket.

But the idea proved unworkable. NASA did not fund further investigations. "This was definitely outside the box," Ridley said.

Tethers Unlimited, an aerospace and defense tech company in Bothell, Wash., took a different approach, addressing the source of the debris.

It developed a tether and a tape that are attached to a satellite before launch and deployed at the end of its life. That should increase its drag and pull it back into the atmosphere. The company also came up with a giant net that would capture objects already in space.

The tether was created in the late 1990s and early 2000s, around the time large satellite constellations were proposed by companies such as Iridium and Teledesic. When many of those plans collapsed, Tethers Unlimited shelved its technology.

"They were interested in the device, but when they all went bust, our market evaporated," company CEO Robert Hoyt said.

A new market could emerge with recent interest in launching small satellites and new constellations. Two of Tethers Unlimited's Terminator Tape products have already launched on small satellites, with a few more set to launch this year, he said.

Debris-removal technology is only about 5 percent of the company's business today. But if everything worked out with the new small-satellite boom, "it could very easily be 10- or 100-fold bigger," Hoyt said.