TL;DR
The sky over Earth is filling faster than anyone is cleaning it. Europe's space agency says its measure of orbital risk got more than ten times worse in a single year, and one tracker now counts almost 16,000 working satellites, nearly two-thirds of them Starlinks. Britain has now done something new: it hired a company to send a robot that grabs two of its own dead satellites and drags them down to burn up. It is only two objects, years away, with a machine that has never flown. But it is the first time a government has bought cleanup on a schedule, and if the grab works, the cleanup crew low orbit will need for data centers and stations starts to exist.
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