I meant it bit of a tongue-in-cheek way, but for the sake of argument it wouldn't be hard for a clean up mission to have an "accident" and actually generate more debris for later missions to clean up. And it might not even be malicious, just side effect of more pressure to launch something to do the clean ups.

To be clear, I'm not saying OP is wrong, it would probably work out fine. But this seems like a fun angle to consider.

I can't find xboneslife's comment to reply to, so replying here

> You can just put the same price on debris addition.

Indeed. A small tax that matches the cost of debris capture payment + minor administrative overhead would encourage the outcome that junk isn't thrown into unrecoverable orbit.

The tax wouldn't be small. I do agree, though, the only real answer is to charge for putting things in orbit and refund it to whoever deorbits the thing.

A fee per kilogram placed in orbit, refundable if the entire mass is deorbited as a single object, seems like a reasonable starting point.

If that fee is the entire estimated near-term cost to recover the object, it would also create incentives for entities putting large amounts of mass in orbit to focus on improved strategies for removal: if removal becomes lower cost than the fee, it's worth paying someone to recover your debris if a satellite fails in order to recover the fee.

This would have to work across borders or else you'd create a downward force on the space industry in your nation. If the US had a tax to launch stuff, then suddenly Russia has a competitive advantage.

> I can't find xboneslife's comment to reply to

I can't even find their account https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xboneslife

Wonder what happened...

Even weirder, this discussion is Google's only relevant hit for "xboneslife."

Surreal.

I went to reply to the user, then got a "comment deleted" error. First time I've seen that on HN.

weird . I hope the deletion thing doesn't become a trend here.

I can't find out what the cost to govt is in order to launch something into space, but you do need govt permission to launch since all space objects must belong to a specific country.

The govt can include the cleanup cost as part of the launch licensing cost.

Mike Judge also thought it was fun to run a Simpsons episode featuring Donald Trump getting elected to the presidency. So… definitely worth thinking through.

You could always slip China a fiver to get them to blow up another satellite or five.

Pretty sure China would prefer to make rockets that don't explode at all. But if you insist, my friend Sergey knows a guy that might have an overstock of aging launchers...

The incident in question is generally believed to have been a weapons test. They deliberately hit a satellite with a rocket to see that they could.

It also created an insane amount of junk in a high orbit that won't deorbit any time soon.