Garbage Collection going Outer Space BIG
It’s fast turning out that even space isn’t the final frontier. True to the nature of living (and unfettered, non-sustainable) development, our home planet is the de facto garbage dump, and before anyone goes, “There’s always… out there…”, we’ve made a pretty good head start outside earth’s atmosphere too. It’s thus to no one’s real surprise when the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon – a metonym for the United States Department of Defense - had launched the Orbital Prime programme to basically plant the seed for commercialising space garbage collection. Korean movie Space Sweepers , aired over at Netflix in 2021, had visited this premise, and incidentally, sets itself circa 2092, the same year of a much older exploration of the same theme by Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories – Magnetic Rose (1990, comic, 1995, animation ). Both featured space garbage collection, albeit with heavily dramatize plotlines, a given to “sell” the stories which turned out to be fairly realistic. The Orbita