Just as birds pose a danger to airplanes in midair, rocket bodies are one of the biggest threats to spacecraft collisions in space. In October 2020, a dead Soviet satellite & the abandoned upper region of a Chinese rocket narrowly avoided a collision in low Earth orbit. Had the objects collided, they would have been blown to smithereens, creating thousands of new pieces of dangerous space debris. Days earlier, the European Space Agency had published its annual space environment report, citing abandoned rocket bodies as one of the gravest threats to spacecraft. To mitigate this risk, the report suggests launch providers deorbit their rockets after they’ve delivered their payload. But Jeffrey Manber, CEO of Nanoracks, best known for hosting private payloads on the International Space Station, thinks that’s a waste of a perfectly good giant metal tube. Manber envisions creating an extraterrestrial chop shop, where autonomous robots would do the work of cutting, bending & welding the bodies of spent rockets into useable laboratories, fuel depots or warehouses. All of NASA’s previous plans depended on astronauts doing much of the manufacturing & assembly work, making the projects expensive, slow & hazardous. The Nanoracks program, known as Outpost, would modify scrapped rockets to give them a second life. Even in Space, one man’s trash can be another man’s treasure.
