Can Commercial Startups Solve the Space Debris Crisis?
Aug 16, 2026
Space around Earth has gotten crowded fast, and the debris piling up there isn’t going anywhere on its own. OrbitRadar currently tracks nearly 30,000 objects in orbit, and only about 18,500 of them are active satellites, meaning the rest is dead hardware, spent rocket bodies, and fragments left over from decades of launches. A spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage crashed into the moon, more than a year after it was left on an uncontrolled trajectory following a lunar mission, a small but telling reminder that leftover hardware from space missions doesn’t simply disappear once its job is done.
Credit: Astroscale
A handful of companies now see an actual business opportunity in cleaning that mess up, and in servicing satellites before they become part of the problem in the first place. Andrew Faiola, commercial vice president at Tokyo-listed Astroscale, put it bluntly when he described space as a global commons that the industry has been treating carelessly. He argued there are real consequences to running a throwaway culture in orbit, and that cleanup is no longer optional if the industry wants to keep using the orbits it depends on.
Two Companies Betting on the Same Problem
Astroscale and Luxembourg-based ClearSpace represent two different approaches to roughly the same bet, that debris removal and satellite servicing will eventually become a real commercial market rather than a niche funded entirely by government grants. Astroscale builds spacecraft engineered to operate safely in close proximity to other objects in orbit, and the company has already demonstrated something few commercial players have managed, docking with another spacecraft using a magnetic capture system. That’s a genuinely difficult technical feat given that objects in low Earth orbit move at roughly 7 to 8 kilometers per second, faster than a bullet, often while tumbling unpredictably. Astroscale reported a 142 percent revenue jump for its fiscal year ended in April, and it’s seeing growing interest from the defense sector too, though the company is still burning through cash and posting sizable operating losses, with a large share of its project income still coming from government contracts rather than private customers.
ClearSpace is approaching the same broader opportunity from a slightly different angle. CEO Luc Piguet described the company’s goal as building the servicing layer for space infrastructure, drawing a comparison to how maintenance industries eventually grew up around roads, shipping, and aviation once those sectors matured. He argued that without something equivalent for space, orbit will end up as cluttered as an unmaintained highway. ClearSpace has developed a satellite fitted with a claw mechanism designed to capture debris and either return it to Earth or push it further out to what’s known as the space graveyard, where collision risk drops sharply. The company raised 26 million euros, around $30 million, back in 2023 and is now preparing another funding round, betting that investor appetite for space infrastructure has matured considerably since then.
Who Actually Has to Clean This Up
Money isn’t the only obstacle standing between this industry and a sustainable business model. Responsibility for removing abandoned hardware in orbit remains, legally speaking, murky territory. The European Space Agency has been explicit that it isn’t a regulator itself and can only enforce debris mitigation rules on its own missions, leaving a much broader gap when it comes to everyone else’s leftover hardware. The agency describes the debris problem as a textbook tragedy of the commons, the kind of issue that essentially requires global cooperation to solve rather than any single actor acting alone.
Credit: ClearSpace
Tim Flohrer, who heads space debris work at ESA, noted that compliance with existing debris standards has been improving gradually among commercial operators, though not quickly enough to actually stop the total volume of junk in orbit from continuing to grow. He pointed out that active satellites already need to perform a rising number of collision avoidance maneuvers just to dodge other satellites and debris fragments, and warned that without faster progress, some orbits could eventually become effectively unusable. Faiola made a related argument for why regulation matters here, comparing the situation to nuclear power plants, where nobody questions that operators need to decommission them responsibly at the end of their working life specifically because regulations require it. His point was that space needs the same kind of regulatory catch up before cleanup becomes an obligation rather than a nice to have.
A Market Still Waiting to Grow Up
Beyond the two companies leading the current conversation, the broader debris picture keeps getting messier by almost every measure available. Researchers tracking the problem globally count tens of thousands of objects larger than 10 centimeters already in orbit, alongside millions of smaller fragments too small to reliably track from the ground, and recent research out of the University of Birmingham has shown that some satellite constellations can grow past a critical threshold where they start generating debris faster than it naturally clears, a dynamic that applies even to some comparatively modest constellations depending on how their orbits are arranged. Ground based incidents keep reinforcing the physical reality behind the statistics too, from a rocket ring that survived reentry and landed on farmland in Kenya to metallic spheres recently recovered on an Australian beach, both reminders that not everything sent to orbit actually burns up the way it’s supposed to.
For companies like Astroscale and ClearSpace, that combination of growing physical risk and tightening regulatory pressure is exactly the environment needed to turn a niche technical capability into an actual market. Piguet noted that investor conversations about the space industry have changed noticeably in just a few years, moving well past basic questions about how satellites even get to orbit toward much sharper scrutiny of supply chains and lead times. Rising defense investment in Europe, driven largely by the current geopolitical climate, has added further momentum to that shift. Whether commercial demand ultimately catches up to what these companies have built remains an open question, but both Faiola and Piguet seem to be betting that regulation, not pure market appetite, will end up being what finally makes the economics work.
