Progressive Rocketry or Creating an Interplanetary Junkyard

In orbit around the Earth are so many satellites and so much junk that a significant part of flight planning is trying to ensure your orbiter doesn't get hit by it.  Significant additional resources are required to track, as much as possible, everything up there down to the last bolt which was lost when a satellite was destroyed or due to some other cause.

Rather than doing anything like housekeeping up there, we have this:

The small spacecraft systems can vary in size from a postage-small, (under an ounce) or up to the size of refrigerator (about 400 pounds).  The Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (S3VI), which is being established at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, will leverage the growing small spacecraft community, according to the US space agency.

- RT: Small spaceships for NASA may mean big leap for humanity

It appears nothing will be done about the junk in orbit until there's a collision up there at which time the media will unleash an anguished cry, "Oh my God, how could this ever happen?"

- NASA

Frankly, we're amazed it hasn't happened already.

This seems so doom and gloom but we're growing the AI all over the place so how about the sci fi garbage satellite 'bot which needs plenty of fuel for maneuvering so it can hunt down errant satellites and 'dock' with the satellite so the garbage satellite can bring it safely to a decaying orbit so they burn up in the atmosphere.

Sure it will be expensive but do you want do this or will you explain to your stockholders how your one hundred million dollar satellite you just orbited was destroyed by some junk left over from a military experiment in which a 'simulated enemy' satellite was destroyed.  Here at the Rockhouse, it seems one of those two eventualities is inevitable.

Just maybe it's time to get cracking on that.