If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites, then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn’t work that way, and a new paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, available as a preprint on arXiv, makes a good argument as to why. We typically cover Turyshev for his work on the solar gravitational lens idea.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX was poised Friday to carry out its latest test of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, the Starship, with plans for a groundbreaking “catch” of the spaceship following a day in orbit.

If we want big things in space, we’ll have to build and assemble them there. Rocket fairings are not large enough to accommodate the large things we want to have in space. Not only that, but the stubborn rocket equation refuses to bend itself to our desires.

As the major powers and the private companies go full tilt with their plans to develop infrastructure and extract resources on the moon, the questions around environmental protection, international regulation and who benefits all come into play. Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science (VU IIRPS) professor Florian Rabitz, together with Xiao-Shan Yap from Utrecht University, explores these concerns in their research article, “Don’t Fly Me to the Moon: A Moratorium on Lunar Industrialization,” published in the journal Global Environmental Politics.