Thanks for letting us know ESA...

Forewarned is four-armed!

That hyphen in the title is doing a lot of heavy lifting

Hmm, I pictured 4 robots holding lazer guns. Pew Pew! Got it!

From the article

>Ever since the ESA commissioned ClearSpace's first project, ClearSpace-1 in 2019, the company has been on a mission to clear space junk.
>
>The mission consists of a giant four-armed robotic spacecraft that can grab space debris. Once the debris is captured, the spacecraft will send it down toward Earth, where it is expected to burn up in the atmosphere.
>
>While the initial plan was to launch ClearSpace-1 in 2025, the tentative year of launch has been moved to 2026, following the recent review. The mission's primary target will be the upper stage of the VEga Secondary Payload Adapter (VESPA) which was launched by the ESA rocket in 2013.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:

From the article

>Ever since the ESA commissioned ClearSpace's first project, ClearSpace-1 in 2019, the company has been on a mission to clear space junk.
>
>The mission consists of a giant four-armed robotic spacecraft that can grab space debris. Once the debris is captured, the spacecraft will send it down toward Earth, where it is expected to burn up in the atmosphere.
>
>While the initial plan was to launch ClearSpace-1 in 2025, the tentative year of launch has been moved to 2026, following the recent review. The mission's primary target will be the upper stage of the VEga Secondary Payload Adapter (VESPA) which was launched by the ESA rocket in 2013.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11auwut/esa_permits_fourarmed_robots_to_start_clearing/j9u4zxn/

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This is an important experiment but the article has a dearth of technical information that would be interesting to the casual subscriber to this Reddit. They are targeting the second stage of a Vega launcher which I think is known as a Zefiro 23 with a gross mass of 26,900 kg (59,300 lb) and unfueled mass of 3,000 kg (6,600 lb) and a length of 7.5m.

I assume it's not tumbling or spinning too much as I'd assume they would aim for a relatively easy target although it looks like it's a pretty good size. I also assume that they will just grab the booster and then de-orbit the entire thing.

I'm thinking that it would be cool if you could catch and de-orbit multiple items by having some sort of ejection mechanism. This obviously would be enormously complex and be constrained to searching out debris with similar enough orbits so that you could capture more than one during a mission. In any case I hope it works.

Seems such a waste to destroy all this equipment that's cost a lot to get into space. Pity it can't be salvaged. Maybe push it into a higher orbit until then?

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