Companies want to clean up space junk. They see dollar signs floating around Earth's orbit. They've decided the trash circling our planet at 17,000 miles per hour represents a business opportunity.
Here's what they're selling: We broke space and now we'll charge you to fix it.
Thousands of dead satellites and rocket parts already orbit Earth. They smash into each other and create more pieces. Each collision spawns hundreds of new projectiles. The problem multiplies itself like a pyramid scheme that actually works.
But these startups have a plan. They'll launch more rockets to catch the junk from the old rockets. They'll add more objects to orbit so they can subtract the objects already there. It's the business equivalent of fighting a grease fire with cooking oil.
The pitch deck writes itself. Slide one: Space is full of garbage. Slide two: We'll clean it for money. Slide three: Here's a rendering of a robotic arm grabbing a satellite. Slide four: Give us forty million dollars.
Investors love it. They see recurring revenue in the void. They imagine subscription models for orbital debris removal. They calculate the total addressable market of every broken thing humanity has ever thrown into the sky and they start breathing heavy.
The technical challenges don't matter. Nobody asks how you grab a tumbling solar panel traveling faster than a bullet. Nobody questions whether catching debris might create more debris. The business model assumes everything will work perfectly in an environment where nothing works perfectly.
Retail traders will dump their savings into space janitor stocks. They'll watch their portfolios crater faster than a decommissioned Soviet satellite. Then they'll blame market manipulation instead of admitting they invested in a company whose entire value proposition is picking up trash they can't see with a robot that doesn't exist yet.
Photo by Andy Hermawan on Unsplash
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