Elon Musk says his spaceship will eat up the junk in space – Times of India

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is confident that his Starship spacecraft will be able to “chomp up” the debris littered around in space with the help of a “moving fairing door”. The tech billionaire spoke of this while trying to answer a user’s query regarding cleaning up the junk in space caused as a result of expeditions undertaken by humans. In his reply, Musk said,“Yes, we can fly Starship around space & chomp up debris with the moving fairing door”. He earlier tweeted about the SpaceX Starlink cover with an image showing the transfer orbit from Earth to Mars.

The space ‘junk’, that includes spare rocket parts and other debris that are floating around in space, could prove dangerous to the spacecraft should they happen to collide with them. SpaceX’s president Gwynne Shotwell had earlier said in an interview with Time Magazine that the Starship was capable of picking up the junk in the Earth’s orbit and storing it in its cargo bay.
Chances of collision will increase with the rise in the number of satellites in the orbit, which is happening as SpaceX has put over 1500 Starlink satellites in the lower Earth orbit and plans increase the number upto 42,000 by mid-2027, as per a report by Business Insider. The first Starship rocket could blast off into space as early as July. Let’s hope it is able to do the job and collect the junk on the route too.