I remember asking once, we don't we just shoot our surplus trash off into the sun and was told that by the cost of launching it outweighs the benefits. Fair!
But what about all of the old satellites and space stations? Why don't we just send a giant magnet around the earth once or twice and then slingshot all that space junk into the sun and thus giving all science fiction writers (when they return from their strike) a plot point they can no longer use in their film scripts?
Seriously though, without the cost of breaching the atmosphere, this seems really cheap to pull, why don't we do this? Why isn't this a standard thing?
To get to the sun you have to decrease your speed. Speed absolutely matters here. If it were possible to round up all the space junk (which it currently isn't) we might as well just set it adrift outside the gravitational influence of Earth
Isn't that just polluting?
But look at all the Space X satellites that have to be replaced every so often, the fact we can't send a giant magnet up to capture the old ones just seems irresponsible. In fact everything we do with space and not considering how to dispose of it is trash.
From what I understand is that the space x satellites when worn out, will slowly drop from orbit (because they already have a really low orbit) and burn up in the atmosphere. So there's that.
Spacex satellites (and all other satellites) have thrusters to drop their orbits. The problem is the old ones that either broke or never had thrusters.