NASA Is Designing a Giant Broom to Sweep Space Junk Out of Orbit

By Clara Olsen — Bohiney Magazine

The Announcement We Deserve

NASA held a briefing that felt less like “Right Stuff” and more like “Right Cleaning Supplies.” After decades of orbital detritus—spent boosters, dead satellites, and the occasional floating glove—America’s space program has chosen a tool so universal it needs no translation: a broom. Not a metaphorical broom. An honest-to-Newton sweeping apparatus designed to push high-velocity trash into holding orbits where robotic bins will collect it for processing. The internal codename is said to be Project Sweepernova, which is the kind of pun you only make when you’ve tried everything else, including nets, harpoons, and pretending the problem will solve itself if you close the blinds.

Engineers describe the device as an unfurling array of bristles made from carbon nanotube filaments: lighter than your conscience, stronger than your excuses. A NASA spokesperson offered the most relatable soundbite of the decade: “We have a mess. We’d like to clean it up.” It’s the first time a space press conference could have been co-sponsored by a hardware store.

Why a Broom, Exactly?

According to lead systems architect Dr. Martha Lindholm, the broom beat out lasers on two points: congressional fundability and vibe. “You can’t pitch ‘orbital plasma cannon’ and expect votes,” she told us, deadpan. “But mention a broom and half the appropriations committee starts sharing stories about their dads sweeping the garage. It reads as responsible.”

An intern reportedly blurted out the idea during a late-night design charrette fueled by cafeteria coffee and despair. People laughed—then stopped laughing—then drew a 600-mile-wide test sketch. If you’ve ever seen a group of PhDs realize Home Ec might save the species, you know the exact silence that followed.

The Mess, Quantified (and Personal)

Low Earth orbit isn’t a serene starfield; it’s a high-speed flea market. There are hundreds of thousands of trackable fragments, and an estimated hundred-million plus smaller pieces that can still puncture a spacecraft like a thumbtack through a party balloon. An astronaut on the ISS told us (through appropriately jittery Wi-Fi) that a chipped bolt from a 1990s booster drifted past the cupola window “like a .22 round sent by a nostalgic hardware store.” Another crew member confessed they’ve started sleeping with their helmets clipped to their pillow—space’s version of putting your wallet in your shoe at the beach.

Digital evidence keeps accumulating: radar blooms that look like snowstorms, grainy cellphone video from a Florida beach showing a “shooting star” that was almost certainly a wrench regretting its life choices, and a leaked Slack thread in which one mission planner typed, in all caps, “WHO DROPPED THE SPATULA IN ’93 AND WHY IS IT STILL OUR PROBLEM.”

Specs From the White Paper

The broom deploys from a heavy-lift rocket and blossoms into an arc of filaments stretched on a skeletal truss. Bristles are tuned to flex rather than shatter, pushing debris toward a corral orbit while minimizing new fragments. Think “snowplow,” except the snow is traveling 17,500 mph and occasionally tries to kill your satellites.

Guidance is autonomous, fed by a sensor array that gives the broom a kind of situational awareness. “It’s not swatting,” Dr. Lindholm said. “It’s persuading.” The official diagram labels one zone ‘nudging corridor’, which tells you NASA still believes in manners.

Voices From the Orbit

A veteran astronaut summed up morale this way: “We trained to be explorers, we work as mechanics, and now we’re apparently understudies for a janitorial ballet.” Another, asked whether the broom might be a hazard itself, said, “Buddy, at this point I’d risk a bristle if it means I stop juking sockets like I’m in a space rodeo.” They want hazard pay, a shield that isn’t purely conceptual, and—this was repeated by three separate crew—earplugs that block out the radio phrase “untracked fragment.”

A contractor down at the Cape (my cousin’s college roommate’s friend, so yes, relationship evidence) texted this trace note from a staging hangar: “Saw a crate labeled SWEEPERNOVA TEST RIG. Smelled like epoxy and optimism.”

What the Funny People Are Saying

• “NASA’s building a broom for orbit. What’s next, a dustpan on Mars and a Swiffer for Saturn’s rings?” — Jerry Seinfeld
• “Finally, a government program I understand: make mess, find broom, argue about whose turn it is.” — Ron White
• “Explain it to aliens: ‘We conquered gravity, then bought a giant broom.’ Sure, that’ll impress the warp-drive crowd.” — Sarah Silverman
• “My broom at home collapses if it touches a Cheerio. NASA’s is Texas-sized and bulletproof. Priorities seem… correct.” — Kevin Hart
• “It’s Earth’s attic up there—full of junk nobody wants to admit they left behind. Now we’re paying movers.” — Bill Burr
• “If it fails, they’ll blame Mercury retrograde. If it works, they’ll call it Virgo season.” — Ali Wong

Politics and Diplomacy: The Great Sweeping Compromise

Congress loves the concept because it sounds like fiscal prudence and frontier ingenuity. The House wants to name it the “Household Tools for Space Stewardship Act.” The Senate wants a study on whether the broom should sweep clockwise or counterclockwise to “honor hemispheric traditions.” Somewhere in a committee report there’s a line item for “heritage-style wooden handle”—because if you give Washington a broom, it will try to turn it into a commemorative statue.

Abroad, the reviews are mixed. Europe suggested a pause on launches—abstinence, but for rockets—while Russia offered a commemorative dustpan, provided all captured debris is minted into coins featuring a heroic profile. China called the broom “performative cleaning” and pitched an orbital vacuum. Expect a UN resolution that sternly recognizes “the importance of tidiness” and creates an international working group on bristle length.

Science Check: Cause, Effect, and the Unforgiving Math

Orbital debris behaves like a chain-reaction economy: each collision pays forward a dividend of shrapnel, which increases the chance of subsequent collisions—a grim cause-and-effect loop better known as the Kessler effect. Basic deduction says: reduce relative velocities or reduce cross-sectional density, or both. The broom tries the latter by gradually herding fragments into narrower, more predictable lanes.

Will it shed bristles? The design says no. The engineers say maybe. The risk models say “only sometimes, and we’ll track those.” Dr. Raj Patel at MIT framed the analogy like this: “Imagine sweeping marbles off a treadmill that’s on a roof in a hurricane. The broom has to move with the treadmill, and also not fling the marbles into your neighbor’s yard.” Statistics then crash the party with a pie chart that mostly reads “uncertainty,” which is the most honest label science has.

Markets & Grift: When There’s Trash, There’s Cash

As soon as “broom” hit the news, broom-adjacent stocks shot up like test rockets. A startup calling itself SpaceSwiffer promised lemon-fresh orbital wipes; an investor deck leaked to us (digital evidence) included a slide, TOTAL ADDRESSABLE DUST, estimated in zettagrams. Jeff Bezos reportedly floated a lunar fulfillment hub to warehouse captured debris—because of course the moon’s first mall will be a recycling center with good lighting and no returns.

Meanwhile, Bohiney Magazine—certified to be 127% funnier than The Onion— received a pitch from an entrepreneur selling NFT snapshots of “notable bristles.” If civilization ends, it will be because someone launched an Initial Bristle Offering.

Public Mood: A Poll, Some Panic, and Archival Footage

We asked 2,003 Americans what NASA should do about space junk:

• 41%: “Finally, use a broom. Feels adult.”

• 27%: “Couldn’t a Roomba do it cheaper?”

• 18%: “Space Junk is a Marvel villain, right?”

• 14%: “Just nuke the mess and let God sort it out.”

Comments included a retired janitor offering to “show those astronauts how to hold a handle” (testimonial evidence) and a middle-schooler proposing an orbital leaf blower (“because leaves run from leaf blowers, therefore junk will too,” a flawless false analogy we nevertheless admire).

We also reviewed archival footage: a 1978 clip of Donald Kessler calmly predicting gridlock in orbit as if he’d just seen the future and wanted a nap. Call it trace evidence of how long we’ve known the ending to this movie.

Helpful Content (Yes, Really): How Not to Make It Worse

Practical Steps for Civilians With Opinions

• Stop launching satire into orbit. Keep it on Bohiney—space has enough sharp objects.

• Vote for boring solutions. Regulations that require deorbit plans aren’t sexy; they work.

• Celebrate cleanup, not just launch day. Ribbon-cuttings for retrieval missions should be as loud as rocket rollouts.

• Support international standards. Even cosmic housekeeping needs a chore chart.

Empathy and Positivity, From One Mess-Maker to Another

We didn’t mean to junk the sky. We got excited, then busy, then complacent. This broom is a ridiculous idea in the precise way human progress often is: awkward, improvised, and just plausible enough to be worth the try. If it fails, we’ll fail while sweeping. There are worse epitaphs.

What the Funny People Are Saying (Encore)

“Space is starting to look like my garage: everything valuable is behind something sharp.” — Trevor Noah
“Evolution goes rockets → satellites → broom. Next up: cosmic lint roller.” — Ricky Gervais
“Imagine Earth writing to the HOA: ‘Sorry for the clutter, we bought a broom.’” — Larry David
“I give it six months before someone rides that thing like a witch and gets fined by the FAA.” — Roseanne Barr
“If aliens see this, they’ll either attack or send over a vacuum. Either way, we’re getting a visit.” — Chris Rock
“Call it ‘Project Witchcraft’ and fund it with a bake sale. Now that’s American science.” — Billy Crystal

The Closing Image

Picture it: a crescent Earth below, a dark velvet of near-space above, and an improbable arc of glittering bristles easing along the limb like a calligrapher’s brush. Tiny shards veer, then gather; the violent randomness becomes a slow, courteous drift. It’s not dignity exactly, but it’s direction. If the story of humanity is that we make messes, the counter-story is that sometimes—after the shouting, before the sequel—we choose to clean.

Disclaimer

This is satirical journalism: names, quotes, polls, “leaked” memos, and specifications are presented in the service of humor and commentary. Still, the orbital debris problem is real, and so is our responsibility. This story is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings — the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Auf Wiedersehen, amigos.

IMAGE GALLERY

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