Grab-and-Tug Works for Big Debris. The Millions of Small Fragments Are Another Problem Entirely.
The technology for removing large, non-tumbling space debris is maturing. The technology for dealing with the far more numerous small and tumbling fragments is not. This gap defines the real shape of the orbital debris problem in 2026.
The GAO’s April 2026 S&T report maps the current state of remediation technology with notable specificity. The most mature approach is robotic capture and tow — a spacecraft that physically grapples a piece of debris and either deorbits it into the atmosphere or relocates it to a graveyard orbit above geostationary altitude. This is no longer theoretical. The U.S. commercial Mission Extension Vehicle 1 moved a geostationary communications satellite to a graveyard orbit in early 2025 using a robotic grapple. China’s Shijian-21 reportedly performed a similar operation. The European Space Agency’s ClearSpace-1 mission, currently in development, will use robotic arms to capture its target debris.
The 2018 and 2019 demonstrations by a European test mission — capturing a dummy satellite with a net, then another with a harpoon — showed that alternative capture mechanisms are technically feasible at the proof-of-concept level. An inflatable debris capture device was tested inside the International Space Station in 2025.
But all of these approaches share a fundamental constraint: they require the target to be large enough to grapple and stable enough not to spin the approach vehicle into an uncontrolled tumble. The roughly one million fragments smaller than 10 centimeters — the fragments that space situational awareness systems currently cannot track reliably — are inaccessible to these methods.
For that population, the candidate technologies are contactless: ground-based or space-based lasers that apply photon pressure to nudge debris into decaying orbits. These approaches show theoretical promise and have laboratory validation, but have not been demonstrated in space. Their maturity lags the robotic capture methods by years. And they face additional regulatory headwinds: existing FAA and FCC regulations may obstruct the operation of laser nudging systems by U.S. companies, a constraint that the GAO flags directly.
The technological picture is therefore a partial one: real capability for large debris, near-zero capability for the fragments that make up the overwhelming majority of the debris population. Addressing that imbalance is the defining technical challenge of the next decade in space safety.
Source: GAO-26-108079, April 2026.