Astroscale, ClearSpace, and the Business Case for Taking Out the Trash in Orbit

In December 2024, a small Japanese spacecraft named ADRAS-J did something no machine had ever done. It maneuvered to within 15 meters of a dead Japanese H-IIA rocket upper stage — a piece of space junk tumbling through low Earth orbit at 28,000 kilometers per hour — and held station. The spacecraft took photographs so detailed you could read serial numbers on the debris.

Astroscale, the Tokyo-headquartered company that built and operated ADRAS-J, had accomplished the hardest part of debris removal: finding an uncooperative object in the vastness of low Earth orbit, matching its velocity, and approaching it closely enough to characterize its tumble rate and physical state. The mission, launched in February 2024, validated proximity operations that are the prerequisite for any future capture and deorbit.

Nine thousand kilometers away, in Lausanne, Switzerland, ClearSpace SA was working through a different set of problems. ClearSpace holds the contract for ESA's first-ever active debris removal mission, ClearSpace-1, originally targeting a Vega Secondary Payload Adapter (VESPA) left in orbit after a 2013 launch. Significant delays and a debris strike that fragmented the original target forced a mission redesign — the target was changed to ESA's defunct PROBA-1 satellite. The mission is now slated for launch in 2026.

Two companies. Two approaches. Both have demonstrated — or are actively demonstrating — that the technical barriers to debris removal are surmountable. And both face the same crushing reality: there is no viable business model for removing debris from orbit.

That sentence deserves emphasis, because it's the entire problem. The technology works. The economics don't.

What the Missions Actually Proved

ADRAS-J proved inspection, not removal. The distinction matters. Approaching a tumbling piece of debris in orbit is extraordinarily difficult — the object isn't cooperating, isn't broadcasting its position, and is rotating unpredictably. ADRAS-J demonstrated that a relatively small, purpose-built spacecraft could perform these proximity operations autonomously, using onboard cameras and LiDAR rather than ground-based radar tracking alone. The images it returned showed the H-IIA upper stage in remarkable detail, including its orientation, surface condition, and attachment points.

The next step is ADRAS-J2, a JAXA-contracted follow-on mission valued at approximately $82-90 million. This one will attempt what ADRAS-J did not: actual capture using a robotic arm, followed by controlled deorbit. If it succeeds, it will be the first time a commercial operator has removed a piece of debris from orbit.

ClearSpace-1 aims to accomplish both inspection and removal in a single mission, using a four-armed capture mechanism to grab the target satellite, then performing a controlled deorbit that burns up both the chaser and the target in the atmosphere. The ESA contract, worth approximately EUR 100 million, covers a single removal.

Neither company has yet completed an actual debris removal. That's not a criticism — both are working through genuinely novel engineering problems on aggressive timelines. But it's important context for the market projections that follow.

The Market Projections vs. The Business Reality

According to MarketsandMarkets and similar research firms, the space debris removal market is projected to grow from $1.15 billion in 2024 to $13.5 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of 25.13%.

Those numbers look impressive until you examine what they actually represent. The current "market" is almost entirely government contracts — JAXA funding ADRAS-J, ESA funding ClearSpace-1, DARPA and the U.S. Space Force funding various in-orbit servicing demonstrations. Private commercial demand for debris removal is, for all practical purposes, zero.

This is not because operators don't care about debris. It's because the economics are upside down.

The cost of a single debris removal mission sits in the $100-500 million range, depending on the target's orbit, size, and tumble rate. The annual cost of debris collisions — aggregated across all operators through satellite damage, avoidance maneuvers, mission life reduction, and insurance claims — was estimated at $86-103 million in a 2020 NASA OTPS cost-benefit analysis. Removing one large piece of debris might reduce that aggregate cost by a few million dollars per year, spread across hundreds of operators who each bear only a tiny fraction.

So: $100-500 million to remove one object, producing a diffuse benefit of a few million per year shared among entities who have no individual incentive to pay. This is the textbook definition of a public goods problem, and it's why no satellite operator has voluntarily purchased a debris removal service.

The Stanford Question

In August 2025, Stanford Law School's Jacks and Coles-Kemp published an analysis titled "Who Takes Out the Trash in Space?" — a paper that has become a quiet touchstone in orbital sustainability discussions. Its central argument is deceptively simple: the legal and economic frameworks governing orbital debris were designed for an era when space was a government activity. They are structurally incapable of addressing a commercial mega-constellation era.

The paper identifies three failures. First, the Liability Convention's fault-based standard for in-orbit damage makes it nearly impossible to assign financial responsibility for debris-caused collisions when the debris itself may be decades old and untraceable to a specific event. Second, no jurisdiction requires operators to post financial assurance for end-of-life disposal — so when a company goes bankrupt (as OneWeb did in 2020, with 74 satellites in orbit), there's no funded mechanism to deorbit its constellation. Third, the absence of any pricing mechanism for orbital capacity means operators treat orbit as a free resource, externalizing the debris risk onto everyone else.

The Stanford paper doesn't propose a single solution. It argues that the problem requires multiple, layered financial mechanisms — and that all of them are prerequisites for a viable debris removal business.

Three Financial Models That Could Close the Gap

What would it take to make debris removal commercially viable — not as a government-contracted demonstration, but as a self-sustaining industry? Three models have been proposed, each addressing a different part of the economic failure.

Debris-removal credits. Modeled on carbon credits, this system would assign a quantified value to removing a piece of debris from orbit based on its collision probability and the severity of potential cascading effects. Operators who generate less debris than their allocation could sell credits. Operators who exceed their allocation — or who want to offset legacy debris — would buy them. The credits would be purchased by debris removal companies, creating a revenue stream proportional to the environmental benefit of removal.

The critical prerequisite is a cap — a regulatory limit on allowable debris contribution per operator, enforced by a jurisdiction large enough to matter. The EU Space Act, currently in legislative negotiation, is the most likely vehicle. Without a cap, credits have no value. Carbon markets taught this lesson: the European Emissions Trading System worked because the EU set a binding cap. Voluntary carbon offsets, without a cap, have been plagued by questionable additionality and weak prices.

Mandatory end-of-life cleanup bonds. Any operator launching a constellation above a specified size would be required to post a bond — held in escrow by a regulatory authority or independent trustee — covering the estimated cost of active debris removal for their entire constellation. If the operator deorbits its satellites as planned, the bond is returned. If the operator fails to deorbit — due to bankruptcy, technical failure, or abandonment — the bond funds a third-party removal contractor.

The bond amount would be set by actuarial assessment of the constellation's orbital characteristics. A 1,000-satellite constellation at 550 km, where natural atmospheric drag will deorbit objects within 5-10 years even without active maneuvering, poses less long-term risk than a 500-satellite constellation at 1,200 km, where objects persist for centuries. The bond would reflect that difference.

The FCC's 5-year deorbit rule already establishes the regulatory principle that operators must dispose of their satellites. A cleanup bond adds financial teeth.

Orbital-use fees. The most ambitious proposal: a per-satellite annual fee for occupying orbital capacity, scaled to altitude, inclination, and conjunction risk. This would function like a land-use tax — you pay for the resource you occupy, and the revenue funds maintenance of the commons. A 2020 University of Colorado study estimated that an optimal orbital-use fee could reduce debris risk by up to 70% while generating revenue sufficient to fund active debris removal at scale.

The political difficulty here is obvious. SpaceX, with over 6,000 Starlink satellites, would face the largest bill. The company has argued, not unreasonably, that its satellites are designed for rapid deorbit and that Starlink's low orbital altitude means its debris risk is inherently time-limited. Any fee structure would need to account for these engineering differences rather than treating all satellites as equivalent polluters.

The Clock Is Running

Astroscale and ClearSpace are cleanup contractors whose services everyone agrees are needed — but nobody has budgeted to hire. Their vehicles work. There's just no one authorized to buy them, no budget to pay for them, and no regulatory mandate requiring their deployment.

The projected growth from $1.15 billion to $13.5 billion by 2035 assumes that the financial infrastructure catches up to the technical capability. It assumes debris-removal credits, or cleanup bonds, or orbital-use fees, or some combination. Without those mechanisms, the market projection is a fantasy — a technology curve without a demand curve.

Meanwhile, the orbital environment isn't waiting. ESA's 2025 Space Environment Report documented 40,230 tracked objects and 7,473 new additions in a single year. The CRASH Clock sits at 2.8 days. Every year without financial infrastructure is another year of accumulating risk in a commons that nobody is paying to maintain.

ADRAS-J proved we can find the trash. ADRAS-J2 and ClearSpace-1 will prove we can pick it up. What remains unproven — and what no technology demonstration can establish — is that someone will pay the bill.

The technology exists. The business model doesn't. That gap is not an engineering problem. It's a financial architecture problem. And it's the gap that determines whether debris removal becomes an industry or remains a series of impressive, expensive, one-off demonstrations.