If someone sent missions to retrieve all 50 of the objects, the overall debris-generating potential in low-Earth orbit would be reduced by 50 percent, according to McKnight. If just the Top 10 were removed, the risk would be cut by 30 percent.
The largest pieces of rocket debris currently in orbit are 22 spent upper stages of the Russian/Soviet Zenit-2 rocket in LEO. They’re all about the size of a double decker bus.
Most nations have stopped leaving debris in LEO since around 2000, but the bad news is China is still leaving more and more debris, and is launching hundreds more rockets just in the next couple years whose upper stages will not deorbit for decades or perhaps centuries. The problem is soon going to get much worse.
So who can clean this up? Satellites have been tested that can grab onto debris and deorbit them, but no one wants to pay for it. Except… The Space Force!? Ours and our adversaries want the technology not to clean up space so much as to have killer satellites that can deorbit each other’s military satellites. But hey, what better way to test this anti-satellite tech than to deobit space junk? If we can get some intelligent leadership once again this could be in the cards. (There’s actually quite a long and important list of Military technology that later had peaceful applications.)