SpaceX executive pitches Starship for space debris cleanup

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Spaceflight Now by Stephen Clark 10/27/2020

SpaceX could use its Starship vehicles to clear out space debris in Earth orbit, alongside the program’s more publicized purpose of ferrying people and cargo to the moon and Mars, a company executive said.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, said the company’s next-generation Starship program could help solve the problem of space junk.

“Starship is an extraordinary new vehicle capability,” Shotwell said in a discussion posted online Oct. 22 by Time. Shotwell was named as one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2020.

The Starship is the upper stage of a giant new rocket SpaceX is developing to boost more than 100 metric tons, or more than 220,000 pounds, of payloads into low Earth orbit. With in-orbit refueling, the Starship’s methane-fed engines could propel more than 100 metric tons of cargo to the moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations, according to SpaceX.

SpaceX is designing the Starship and its massive booster rocket — named the Super Heavy — to be fully reusable. Both vehicles will come back to Earth for vertical landings to be turned around for more missions.

“Not only will it decrease the costs of access to space, it’s the vehicle that would transport people from Earth to Mars,” Shotwell said in an interview with Time’s technology columnist Patrick Lucas Austin. “But it also has the capability of taking cargo and crew at the same time, and so it’s quite possible that we could leverage Starship to go to some of these dead rocket bodies — other people’s rocket’s, of course — basically pick up some of this junk in outer space.”

More: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/10/27/spacex-executive-pitches-starship-for-space-debris-cleanup/