Last Monday, Russia launched a missile at one of its own satellites to test its anti-satellite capabilities, generating at least 1,500 units of debris. Some scraps flew so dangerously close to the International Space Station that the astronauts on board were forced to shelter inside their transport spacecraft (read: escape pods).

The test, which was condemned by space programs from NASA to the European Space Agency, was a dramatic reminder of a major interstellar problem: Space is increasingly full of junk.

• In May, NASA estimated that there are over 23,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the planet, and over 100 million pieces of space debris larger than a millimeter.

And as cosmic elbow room becomes rarer, some companies see a business opportunity in becoming interstellar garbage collectors.

Junk luggers

The reason debris has piled up in space is twofold: 1) there’s not a lot of enforceable legal responsibility for entities to clean up after themselves in space and 2) it’s expensive and hard to do.

“It’s a multitude of issues. It is technically challenging, I don’t think we have solved all the technical challenges,” Carolin Frueh, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, told Emerging Tech Brew. “There’s the legal challenge, whom can I grab, so to speak? And then, of course, who pays for it?”

Some satellite providers—like Starlink—deorbit their own satellites, while specialist companies like ClearSpace are sprouting up with inventive ways to collect space junk, like using a drone-like satellite to capture space junk using a net.

One of the biggest companies in space debris removal is Astroscale, which has raised over $204 million since its founding in 2013.

Astroscale’s operation consists of a robotic arm called the ELSA-d, which connects to docking plates preinstalled on satellites, allowing the robotic arm to bring the decommissioned satellites low enough into Earth’s atmosphere that they burn up upon reentry.

• The company has worked with satellite broadband provider OneWeb in getting the ELSA-d in the field, outfitting at least 200 of its new satellites with Astroscale-compatible docking plates, Ron Lopez, president and managing director at Astroscale US, told us.

Big picture: Since the beginning of the space age, government programs have left decommissioned satellites and empty rocket stages orbiting above Earth.

Now, with a new space race emerging among private enterprises, the cosmos could grow even more crowded. One example: In early November, companies including Amazon, Astra, Boeing, Inmarsat, Intelsat, Hughes Network, OneWeb, SpinLaunch, and Telesat filed with the FCC to launch nearly 38,000 broadband satellites.

Click here to read the full story.—JM

You know what they say: death, taxes, and “Apple Car” rumors.

The latest on the latter: Bloomberg reports that Apple has an aggressive new internal timeline for Project Titan, its automotive endeavor. Apple reportedly wants to debut a fully driverless electric vehicle by 2025.

• That’s sooner than the 2026–2028 window engineers had reportedly been planning for, but a bit later than a 2024 target Reuters reported last December.
• The updated vision comes after a leadership shakeup in September, when Apple’s head of smartwatch and health software, Kevin Lynch, took over Project Titan. He’s the project’s fifth exec in the ~7 years since it began.

Where’s the confidence coming from?

According to Bloomberg, Apple thinks it’s close to finishing an in-house, purpose-built chip for its eventual car.

• Self-driving cars have to process an incredible amount of data in real time in order to safely function.
• For context, when Nvidia created a chip for AVs in 2017, it decided 320 trillion operations per second was a reasonable processing capacity.

FWIW...Last year, Apple was also rumored to be exploring lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries—a safer, cheaper, but lower-range battery chemistry that Tesla also says it will start using in standard-range vehicles.

Looking ahead...The hard part is building a safe, reliable self-driving car from scratch. But the road doesn’t end there: Apple also has to find a business model that makes sense—something that’s being debated internally, per Bloomberg—and begin manufacturing the cars at a scale large enough to support that model.

Click here to view this story on-site.—DM

Right now, the hottest thing in the stock market—even hotter than the “metaverse,” perhaps—is electric vehicles. Rivian’s and Lucid’s stock prices went bonkers last week. Tesla’s worth a trillion bucks.

But, but, but...Just where do we stand in the EV-adoption curve? As of June 2021, 7% of US car owners have an EV or plug-in hybrid, per Pew Research, with Tesla being by far the leading brand. Worldwide, about 1% of cars on the road were electric in 2019, per the IEA.

• As for ETB readers, 13% of you report owning an EV.

Looking ahead...More than half (63%) of ETB respondents based in the US said they’re more likely or much more likely to buy an EV now that the infrastructure bill has passed. A third (33%) of you said you remain as likely to buy one as before.

• The remaining 1% of respondents said they’re less likely to buy post-legislation.

Click here to take this week’s reader poll on, naturally, the metaverse.—DM

Stat: Last year, 17.6 GWh of lithium-ion batteries reached the end of their life worldwide, but by 2035 that figure could explode to 140+ GWh, per a new Lux Research forecast. The question is if recycling capacity will scale up fast enough to repurpose that for EVs.

Quote: “We’re not into it. It has popped up on the radar of Wall Street—huge valuations tossed around. We get a lot of inquiries, and we turn them all down.”—Gerhard Behles, cofounder of music production software Ableton

Read: Singapore’s “smart nation” ambitions have given way to ubiquitous surveillance.

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Monday: Elizabeth Holmes will continue her testimony in the Theranos trial, after being called to the stand for the first time last Friday. She faces 11 counts of defrauding investors, related to the collapse of her blood-testing startup.

Wednesday: This is the earliest possible launch day for NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), in which the space agency will send a four-foot-wide spacecraft hurtling into a massive asteroid, in an attempt to divert the space rock’s path. Don’t worry, this is just a test—there’s no risk to the Earth right now.

Thursday and Friday: Nothing, because the Brew is off for Thanksgiving .

Toy Story was released on this day in 1995. What’s...the tech angle (???), you may ask?

No, it’s not Buzz Lightyear's space suit: It’s the tech Pixar used to create the movie. Toy Story was the first-ever feature-length film created entirely via computer animation.

• This was a pivotal point for the world of animation, which had mostly relied on hand-drawn illustrations up until that point.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Thanks to its AI system, Grammarly is now one of the most valuable US startups
• Tucked away in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill is $500 million for smart-city projects
• Meet the group trying to build a Noah’s Ark for threatened species’ DNA