“Scotty, lock onto that ship with our tractor beam.” That’s my attempt at writing a classic line said by Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner in the original Star Trek, but it could someday come true if scientists are able to make tractor beams for real.
How this all works gets pretty geeky, but basically you’d have a spacecraft with an electron gun that would fire negatively charged electrons at a dead target satellite which would make the target satellite have a negative charge. “The electrostatic attraction between the two would keep them locked together despite being separated by 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters) of empty space.” according to the article. They would never actually touch, but the positive and negative fields would allow the spacecraft to pull the target to a desired orbit (told you it’d be pretty geeky!).
How much will this technology cost to commercialize? What if I told you $1 Trillion dollars! (well that would be a lie). This research is still hypothetical and being worked on in the lab, with no real plans to actually build it today, but maybe someday we’ll have tractor beams and be able to clean up space debris. A geek can dream.
Sci-fi inspired tractor beams are real, and could solve a major space junk problem