The UK Space Agency (UKSA) has given two companies £4m to design a space clean-up mission that could launch as soon as 2026.
The winning prototype will track down and capture two defunct satellites already orbiting Earth, then cast them into the atmosphere where they will burn up. Amongst the proposals are two innovative solutions: Britain's first garbage truck for space, and a spacecraft with a robotic arm.
"For the last six decades we've been launching satellites into space without really thinking about what happens at the end of their life," Rory Holmes of ClearSpace, one of the competing companies, told Sky News.
"When they run out of fuel or when they break, we just discard them. We leave them to clog up space.
"We're in a situation now where space is quite congested and all these different dead objects are whizzing around, crisscrossing each other's paths, sometimes colliding, and sometimes really getting in the way of...