A dedicated mission to capture and deorbit an inert object already in orbit, the only remedy for congestion that prevention alone no longer clears.
Active debris removal means sending a spacecraft to capture an inert object already in orbit, an abandoned launcher stage or a dead satellite, in order to deorbit it or move it aside. It is distinct from end-of-life disposal, which is an obligation on the operator of a satellite still under control, whereas active removal addresses objects nobody commands any more, many of them predating any disposal rule at all. Orbital environment models have concluded since the 2000s that full compliance with disposal rules no longer stabilizes the low-Earth-orbit debris population, and that removing a few large objects a year would be required, which makes the technique a condition of future insurability rather than a technical curiosity. The difficulties are as legal as they are technical, since the 1967 Outer Space Treaty keeps jurisdiction with the state of registry, so a piece of debris cannot be captured without the consent of the state that launched it, even after thirty years of abandonment. For insurance, a removal mission combines the two profiles hardest to price, a demonstration flight and a rendezvous with an uncooperative target.
The European Space Agency signed a contract worth roughly 86 million euros with the ClearSpace consortium in November 2020 for the first debris removal mission, targeting a Vespa payload adapter left in orbit by a Vega launcher in 2013. In August 2023 the agency announced that the target itself had been struck by debris and fragmented, illustrating the race between the remedy and the problem.
ADR, active debris removal, nettoyage orbital, capture de débris