Let’s make one thing clear straight away: Wastation is not a programme currently being developed by NASA or by some secret organisation with billions to burn. It is a ‘futurotype’ – in other words, a scenario designed to explore a possible technology and the upheavals it might cause. A work of speculative fiction, then, but one built on very real scientific problems and avenues of research.
In this future, set at the end of the 21st century, the Earth can no longer absorb the billions of tonnes of waste produced by humanity. ‘Depodrones’ – capable of flying, driving or sailing – travel across the planet to automatically collect abandoned rubbish. The collected waste is gathered into huge containers and then transported to space lifts.
Their destination lies some 5,000 kilometres from Earth: a two-kilometre-long orbital factory, entirely dedicated to processing our rubbish. Its name, Wastation, perfectly sums up its function: a space station that has become the industrial waste disposal facility for an entire civilisation.
Inside this monumental structure, the waste would be subjected to a thermal plasma arc exceeding 15,000 degrees. It would not simply be burnt, as in a terrestrial incinerator. The material would be broken down to the atomic level, then sorted, recombined and transformed into new materials.
Plastics, heavy metals, electronic components, pharmaceutical residues and persistent pollutants could thus be integrated into a vast orbital circular economy. The recovered materials would be used to manufacture satellites, space stations, spacecraft or the components of a future extraterrestrial industrial zone. Instead of sending every screw, every metal plate and every structural component from Earth, humanity would build its space future using the remnants of its industrial past.
Moreover, ‘Wastation’ would not deal solely with terrestrial waste. Patrol drones would be tasked with capturing out-of-service satellites, rocket stages and debris already in orbit. This part of the scenario is far from absurd. Space agencies are actually working on systems capable of approaching, capturing and deorbiting objects that have become uncontrollable.
Earth’s orbit is already a vast, invisible scrapyard. According to the most recent European estimates, more than 46,000 objects are regularly tracked from the ground, whilst millions of smaller fragments escape this surveillance. Their total mass exceeds 17,000 tonnes. Even a fragment measuring just a few centimetres, travelling at several kilometres per second, can destroy a satellite or endanger a crew.
NASA has also explored the idea of recovering materials from abandoned satellites. Aluminium, titanium, steel, silicon, ceramics and residual fuels could become resources. Every kilogramme recycled directly in space would be one kilogramme that would no longer need to be pulled away from Earth’s gravity. In this respect, Wastation takes an existing line of thinking to its logical extreme.
The project becomes far more mind-boggling when it envisages sending billions of tonnes of Earth’s waste into orbit. The space lifts required for this operation do not yet exist. They would require the construction of an extraordinarily long, lightweight and strong cable, capable of supporting its own weight, withstanding atmospheric stresses, vibrations and the risk of collision. We are still only at the stage of studies and experiments.
The amount of energy required to continuously disintegrate such a vast quantity of matter would also be phenomenal. Added to this would be the construction of the station, its power supply, its cooling, the maintenance of the reactors, the recovery of waste and the securing of the countless containers travelling between Earth and space.
A single accident could produce exactly the opposite of the desired result. An explosion of a container or of the station itself could scatter a massive amount of debris into orbit. Instead of cleaning up the Earth, Wastation could render part of the surrounding space unusable for decades.
Thomas Michaud therefore envisages a station almost entirely run by robots and remotely controlled by thousands of human operators. A few ‘space refuse collectors’ would still be needed to carry out delicate repairs, replace essential components or recover lost containers. This is undoubtedly one of the most dangerous future jobs ever imagined.
Above all, the project raises a moral question far more interesting than its mere technical feasibility. By moving our rubbish into space, would we truly be solving the problem, or would we simply be moving the bin to a different location? Humanity already has an unfortunate tendency to view every new accessible environment as a resource to be exploited and, sooner or later, as a place to dump what is cluttering it up.
Wastation could rid the planet of millions of tonnes of toxic substances. But it could also provide a brilliant excuse for our consumer society. Why produce less, repair more or give up disposable items if a magical factory can make it all disappear 5,000 kilometres above our heads?
This is precisely where this mad idea becomes fascinating. A forward-looking project does not need to be immediately feasible to be useful. It allows us to take our logic to its logical conclusion and observe what it reveals. In the case of Wastation, the conclusion is rather grim: rather than radically changing the way we produce and consume, we might be able to build a two-kilometre-long industrial monster in space so that we can carry on living almost as before.
Wastation is part ecological utopia, part technological nightmare. It envisions an Earth that has become clean once more, almost a sanctuary, yet surrounded by a colossal industrial apparatus tasked with eternally processing the excesses of its inhabitants.
This future is technically a very distant prospect and probably unachievable in this form. Yet some of its building blocks already exist: autonomous drones, plasma torches, space robotics, satellite recovery and the recycling of materials in orbit. As is often the case, science fiction does not predict the future exactly. It charts a course, exaggerates our contradictions and forces us to look beyond the edge of our rubbish bin.
The real question posed by *Wastation* is therefore not whether we will build this plant in 2090. It is whether humanity will choose to change its ways before being forced to send its rubbish into the stars.
