Now, a growing group of companies is betting that cleaning up this orbital junk, and servicing satellites before they become it, could become a business in its own right. Without servicing, Piguet said, motorways "would be littered with cars." Space politicsThe question of who is responsible for removing abandoned space hardware remains a legal grey area. "Space debris is a classic 'tragedy of the commons' dilemma and therefore should be tackled by global cooperation," the agency says on its website. Flohrer said that compliance with space debris standards is slowly improving, particularly among commercial operators, but not fast enough to stop the amount of junk in orbit from growing.