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We like to tell ourselves that “space sustainability” is a noble goal. It sounds responsible, the sort of thing that reasonable people can agree on.
But peel back the language, and you’ll find that “sustainability” amounts to, at best, a holding pattern, and at worst, an excuse. It says, “Let’s make sure we don’t make things worse,” instead of “Let’s make things better.”
Consider the current options for “responsible disposal,” the first of which is that operators can boost a dead satellite into what we call a “graveyard” orbit. Not a place where the object is dismantled, recycled, or put to rest — a dumping ground where it will drift for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. In other words, the orbital equivalent of a landfill.
The alternative — designing satellites to burn up in the atmosphere somewhere between five and 25 years after their final use — isn’t much better. Imagine if we were allowed to let our old cars run until they stopped and leave them there, wherever that was, for five years or more. If it sounds crazy, it’s because it is. The fragments from those satellites — the bolts, shards and slivers — will remain. Some will fall, but many will keep circling, like tiny bullets waiting for an unlucky target.
I’m excited for the coming class of debris removal demonstrations, but they won’t be enough to eliminate this hazard. Take the European Space Agency’s ClearSpace-1 mission, which I admire deeply. This $130 million effort to capture and deorbit a defunct rocket adapter will work, and it will be rightfully celebrated, but that’s one adapter against tens of thousands of large debris objects and millions of untracked fragments. It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
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This is where sustainability fails us. It accepts today’s orbital reality of 40,000 pieces of tracked debris objects and countless invisible ones as the baseline. It sets its sights low —“Don’t let it get worse” — rather than daring to create a new paradigm.
That’s why we must abandon the concept of sustainability and embrace regeneration, which begins with the principle that damage is not a fixed inheritance, but a wound that can be healed. In Indigenous knowledge systems, this is not a metaphor. You don’t simply stop harming a river. You also restore its flow, you tend to its banks, you reintroduce the life that once thrived there. A forest fire is followed by ceremony and replanting, not by merely declaring the scorched land “stable.”
In practice, regeneration in orbit would work much like tending a terrestrial ecosystem. It starts with responsibility at the point of action: Every launch carries not only a payload for its owner but also takes action to remove debris. This could look like a satellite equipped to rendezvous with a piece of defunct hardware on its way to its own mission, or a launch provider paying into a shared orbital cleanup program that dispatches dedicated service craft alongside the customer payloads. Once captured, debris can be brought down in controlled reentries, or ferried to on-orbit depots where robotic arms dismantle and process it. Some materials — aluminum, titanium, carbon composites — can, theoretically, be melted or cut into usable shapes right there. Others might be compacted and stored until they can be transformed into new spacecraft structures, protective shielding or fuel tanks. The beauty of this approach is that the debris itself becomes the resource base for a circular space economy.
The technology to do this already exists in pieces. Astroscale has demonstrated magnetic capture and is now pursuing multi-object removal. ClearSpace is building robotic arms capable of grappling tumbling debris. Orbit Fab’s refueling stations could double as pit stops for cleanup fleets. Nanoracks has already cut metal on orbit, proving that in-space recycling is feasible. Each of these efforts is like a stone in the riverbed: individually useful, but only when placed together do they form a path across.
That’s not to say that there aren’t real challenges, but they are more political than physical. Cost is the obvious first barrier. ClearSpace-1’s $130 million price tag to remove a single object is too expensive to scale unless design, manufacturing and operations are standardized. The law presents another tangle, because under the Outer Space Treaty, an object in orbit remains the property and liability of the nation that launched it, even if it’s long dead. That means non-consensual debris removal is not a thing. You can’t simply “salvage” debris without permission, no matter how dangerous it is. And then there’s geopolitics: A debris-removal vehicle can look uncomfortably like an anti-satellite weapon, turning a good-faith cleanup into a security risk in the eyes of rivals. Finally, the market itself offers no near-term incentive. Abandoning debris costs nothing to the myopic eye, so the cheapest business decision is to leave it where it is.
But the benefits of regeneration, if we commit to it, are profound. It reduces collision risk for the satellites we depend on for GPS, weather forecasts, financial systems, disaster response and science. It lengthens the usable lifetime of our most valuable orbits, delaying the day when congestion could force us to abandon certain orbital regimes. It creates an entirely new industry — one that merges robotics, manufacturing and environmental stewardship — and it opens up the possibility of using space-derived materials for on-orbit manufacturing, reducing the need to launch everything from Earth. Most importantly, it shifts our relationship with the orbital environment from extraction and abandonment to one of care and reciprocity.
Other knowledge systems have long understood this shift. In Hawaiian practice, the ahupua‘a model of land management ensured that each community cared for the mountains, streams and reefs as a single connected system. They couldn’t focus on just one area, because upstream neglect meant downstream collapse. In Andean ayni, reciprocity is not just kindness but the fundamental law of survival: You give back to the land, the water and the community in proportion to what you take.
Space regeneration is simply the extension of these principles upward into the orbital shell that cradles our planet. If we treat space as kin — a realm we are in relationship with, not a warehouse we exploit — regeneration is not optional. It becomes the obvious, necessary act. We do not leave the weeds to choke the garden. We tend it, year after year, so that it grows richer and more alive than when we first set foot in it.
We wouldn’t accept a “sustainable” ocean already choked with plastic, so we shouldn’t accept a “sustainable” space already crowded with junk. But the window for regeneration is closing. The orbital environment doesn’t care about our good intentions, only our actions. We can repair it and restore it. But only if we start now.
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