commented that it would be the taxpayers of the United States that would end up paying for it all. Well 4.5 years later and there's still no movement on the project.
There is a group called Star, Inc that has plans to collect the waste and either sling it back to Earth in such a way as to burn it up OR just recycle it in space for some use on some kind of space station. I'm not talking Death Star here.
"Star, Inc. president Jerome Pearson...contends that a fleet of garbage-collecting spacecraft, each equipped with approximately 200 nets, could -- over the course of seven years -- meander through low Earth orbit (LEO) and ensnare thousands of dangerous objects. Star, Inc. believes it is able to dispose of the captured trash by chucking it down to Earth's radiated nuclear waste-dumpin the South Pacific, flinging it in a trajectory so that it eventually erodes in Earth's orbit. If that fails, Star proposes to actually recycle the trash in space for use in galactic construction projects."
Here is a new image of what the amount of low orbit debris looks like.
Nets? Really? I suppose I can't think of a better way off the top of my head. I still think we could just send the junk to the Sun. Good ole' Sol will burn that stuff up real nice.
http://www.switched.com/2010/08/18/scooping-space-waste-could-pave-way-for-cosmic-elevator/
