Quote:
Originally Posted by August
First they have to figure out how to catch things going thousands of miles per hour.
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This they've done, with a variety of concepts. Usually it's been proposed by private industry, so they're looking to make money off the deal, which makes sense.
As most orbits are prograde of some sort, West to East, the closing speeds aren't as bad as you'd assume. A lot of the proposals are calling for large fishing net style of collection. Then they just close up the net with the junk inside of it.
The real kicker is collecting the returned items. If you just let them burn up in reentry, then there's no profit to be had. Building the infrastructure to reclaim the stuff is the problem. Give the nature of the process, it will usually not be a craft that can be easily controlled during reentry, the aerodynamic forces will send it wherever it feels like. So not only will you have difficulty getting to it, finding it and hoping it didn't land somewhere populated, or deep, is a major concern.
It will only become feasible when insitu (orbital) processing stations become practical, that way controlled reentry won't be as big of an issue.