🔛 Unleash your inner goblin

December 9, 2022

'Tis that time of the year again — your feed must be flooded with neon-colored Spotify Wrapped posts about people's top artists and listening personalities. Is there a better indicator that the holiday season begun?

• 'Goblin mode' — Oxford's word of the year captures the zeitgeist of our times

• TikTok is becoming less viral

• Disney creates an AI system to automatically change the age of actors

The next space race? Cleaning up space junk

🌎 As we speak, thousands of small pieces of debris are circling the Earth at over 17,000 miles per hour.

💥 An astonishing 60% of 6,000 satellites, currently out of commission, are drifting through space. Any collision would be disastrous — a cascading effect could halt space travel altogether.

🛰️ Scientists are exploring everything to deal with the issue: from lasers to melt debris to create fuel or dragging junk to the Earth's atmosphere to set them on fire.

For rivals Japan and China, the new space race is about removing junk

🗑️ In competition with China's space abilities, Japan intends to offer routine removal services by 2030.

☄️ Europe has a $102M deal to recover orbital trash, weighing 122 kgs, in space since 2013. The "first active debris removal mission" will launch in 2025.

🛸 The US has also issued plans to track and mitigate debris in orbit.

Apple's co-founder is getting into the game

🚀 Several startups are preparing to launch missions to eliminate deadly debris.

🍎 Steve Wozniak's new venture, Privateer, has debuted software to monitor traffic - this predicts the trajectory of pieces of space junk and avoids accidental collisions.

Challenges of the new space race

⚠️ Removal missions must do a lot of guesswork about the position, speed, and mass of space junk. They need to accommodate extra fuel and prepare for unforeseen situations.

💰 This threatens space's gold rush: junk avoidance makes ops much more expensive than they need to be.

🏁 Cleanup will need global cooperation as a country cleaning up another's junk could be considered interference. An international framework could also decide who pays for/profits from these efforts.

If you have any feedback, drop it here. Have a great weekend!