Billion-Dollar Space Startup Begins Tests Targeting Orbital Junk
- Japan’s Astroscale starts mission to surveil discarded rocket
- CEO wants to deploy tow trucks in space to dispose of debris
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For more than a decade, an abandoned piece of a Japanese rocket has been speeding uncontrolled around Earth, at risk of colliding with active satellites and causing havoc in orbit.
Now a Tokyo-based startup run by a veteran of McKinsey & Co. and Japan’s Ministry of Finance is sending a spacecraft to inspect the debris, a major step in the effort to counter the threats that human-made space junk pose to multibillion-dollar systems being deployed by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others.