Job Op: Orbital Debris Removal (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

The DOD's cutting edge research lab, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a.k.a. DARPA, is looking for somebody to dispose of the zillions of pieces of space detritus* that threaten the space station, shuttles, satellites and future missions to Mars or wherever. Actually, there's no real job yet -- DARPA's TTO (Tactical Technology Office)'s RFI (Request for Information) regarding implementation of an ODR (orbital debris removal) capability is only a fishing expedition, but you might as well be ready: surely there'll be a whopping contract at some point. Probably wouldn't work to send sanitation workers in space suits up the space elevators, but I'm thinking we could double up on those pipes we're going to need to pump carbon into space and have them suck the space junk back down to Earth for recycling.

* ZPSD?: "...more than thirty-five thousand man-made objects have been cataloged by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. Nearly twenty-thousand of those objects remain in orbit today, ninety-four percent of which are non-functioning orbital debris. These figures do not include the hundreds-of-thousands of objects too small to be cataloged, but still large enough to pose a threat to approximately nine-hundred operational satellites in orbit around the Earth. In addition, collisions between debris objects could potentially lead to a continuously growing debris population...." -- from the RFI.