In 60 years, 5,500 rockets have been launched into space, and the space travel has left so much debris that it threatens future space travel.
The longer the space debris travels around the globe, the more dangerous it becomes.
Decommissioned satellites and burnt-out rocket stages collide and shatter into small pieces, making the traffic of existing satellites increasingly dangerous.
In 2009, an old Russian military satellite collided with an active communications satellite, and both shattered into thousands of pieces. Some of them led to the evacuation of the ISS two years later.
Clip: see the clones go on their first suicide mission:
The ClearSpace-1 satellite is scheduled for its first mission in 2025, when it will be sent up to grab an old rocket part from an ESA rocket and plunge both the rocket part and itself into the atmosphere where they burn up. Video: ESA.
In order to avoid similar incidents, ESA is now planning, in collaboration with the company ClearSpace, to develop a system to catch decommissioned satellites and rocket stages before these devices disintegrate in a collision.
The idea is to launch a large satellite that in the cabin can carry smaller devices with grappling claws.
The small devices will be equipped with rocket engines to, for example, move to a higher orbit and be guided to the space debris that is intended to be picked up.
Once the device has attached a four-armed grapple around the object to be disposed of, it will be headed for Earth and both grapple and space debris will be burned up in the vaporosphere.
It is estimated that the first grab claw will be sent to work in 2025. The subject will be an old connector that ESA left in space in 2013. The connector is the size of a washing machine and weighs 112 kg.
If the plan succeeds, ClearSpace will have more projects and some bigger ones. The biggest will be the removal of the old ESA satellite Envisat, which weighs eight tonnes and is the size of a house.
