Clean the space: Elon Musk’s new Starship system may help remove dirt from Earth’s orbit

SpaceX, the aerospace company owned by business mogul Elon Musk, may add a feature to its next-generation starship system that can help clean up dirt from the earth’s orbit, according to media reports. It will do the task while the ship is not carrying people to Mars and the moon.

Elon Musk has said that he plans to make the rocket-spaceship duo carrying the company’s entire spaceship load. The Starship system sits at the centre of the founder’s vision to colonise Mars.

If everything goes as per plan, the Starship’s tasks would include carrying people to faraway cosmic locales and bring them back on earth, carrying satellites into the orbit and, in all probability, collecting and de-orbiting big pieces of space junk that cause trouble.

SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell in a recent interview with the Time Magazine highlighted the spaceship’s new probable role. “It’s quite possible that we could leverage Starship to go to some of some of these dead rocket bodies — other people’s rockets, of course — basically, go pick up some of this junk in outer space,” she was quoted as saying.

The Starship system’s giant rocket, Super Heavy, will come back to earth after launching the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) Starship spacecraft into orbit, and make a vertical landing here.

“It’s not going to be easy, but I do believe that Starship offers the possibility of going and doing that,” Shotwell told Time technology’s Patrick Lucas Austin.

According to several experts, space junk poses a big threat to the use and exploration of the space by humans going forward. If the Starship indeed cleans up the junk, it will prevent space collisions.