remember the premise of gravity?

Japan’s space agency will launch a space trawler that will drag a giant aluminium and steel net while orbiting Earth, hoping to bag itself some space junk.

there are 100m pieces of space junk.
2014-04-10:

Asteroids and comets that cross Earth’s orbit pose a credible risk of impact, with potentially severe disturbances to Earth and society. Numerous risk mitigation strategies have been described, most involving dedicated missions to a threatening object. We propose an orbital planetary defense system capable of heating the surface of potentially hazardous objects to the vaporization point as a feasible approach to impact risk mitigation.

including immediate applications like getting rid of space debris as you scale it up.

2014-05-03:

Abandoned artificial satellites. Tanks jettisoned from shuttles. Refuse generated during space station construction. This junk, space debris, is traveling around the Earth at speeds approaching 8 km/s. This is a story of 2075, a time in which this space garbage has become a serious problem. This is Planetes, a near-future hard scifi story that focuses on a small group of debris collectors who are part of a larger company. Both the original manga and the anime adaptation set small personal stories and dramas in the realistic context of near-future space exploration, complete with radiation sickness, impacts of growing up on the moon, and of course, the dangers of space debris.

2015-11-03: this is why we need giant lasers to vaporize that shit.

2019-04-24:

There are 130m tiny bits of debris floating in orbit that, due to their high velocity, can cause catastrophic damage to space vehicles and satellites. Researchers are developing a compact orbiting device to semi-autonomously seek out the debris and catch it in a net.

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