Sitting in a drab industrial neighborhood surrounded by warehouses and factories, Astroscale鈥檚 Tokyo office seems appropriately located for a company seeking to enter the waste management business.
Only inside do visitors see signs that its founder, Mitsunobu Okada, aspires to be more than an ordinary garbageman. Schoolroom pictures of the planets decorate the door to the meeting room. Satellite mock-ups occupy a corner. Mr. Okada greets guests in a dark blue T-shirt emblazoned with his company鈥檚 slogan: Space Sweepers.
Mr. Okada is an entrepreneur with a vision of creating the first trash collection company dedicated to cleaning up some of humanity鈥檚 hardest-to-reach rubbish: the spent rocket stages, inert satellites and other debris that have been collecting above Earth since Sputnik ushered in the space age. He launched Astroscale three years ago in the belief that national space agencies were dragging their feet in facing the problem, which could be tackled more quickly by a small private company motivated by profit.
鈥淟et鈥檚 face it, waste management isn鈥檛 sexy enough for a space agency to convince taxpayers to allocate money,鈥� said Mr. Okada, 43, who put Astroscale鈥檚 headquarters in start-up-friendly Singapore but is building its spacecraft in his native Japan, where he found more engineers. 鈥淢y breakthrough is figuring out how to make this into a business.鈥�
Over the last half-century, low Earth orbit has become so littered with debris that space agencies and scientists warn of the increasing danger of collisions for satellites and manned spacecraft. The United States Air Force now keeps track of about 23,000 pieces of space junk that are big enough 鈥� about four inches or larger 鈥� to be detected from the ground.
Scientists say there could be tens of millions of smaller particles, such as bolts or chunks of frozen engine coolant, that cannot be discerned from Earth. Even the tiniest pieces move through orbit at speeds fast enough to turn them into potentially deadly projectiles. In 1983, the space shuttle Challenger returned to Earth with a pea-size pit in its windshield from a paint-chip strike.
And plans are being made to make low orbit even busier, and more essential for communications on Earth. Companies like SpaceX and OneWeb are aiming to create vast new networks of hundreds or even thousands of satellites to provide global internet connectivity and cellphone coverage. The growth of traffic increases the risk of collisions that could disrupt communications, as in 2009 when a dormant Russian military satellite slammed into a private American communications satellite, causing brief disruptions for satellite-phone users.
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