Second stage

The first stage rocket is getting caught and reused at home. The last stage is left... to drift in orbit. WIRED presents a plan to hollow these stray rockets for space-stations. The mastermind is one Jeffrey Manber, CEO of Nanoracks; they're looking to next May for attacking the junk. [ALSO 11/4: Popular Mechanics, but that article isn't as good.]

Meanwhile because everything is political the WIRED article excoriates the Clinton / Gore Administration, for scotching reusability in favour of the International Space Station. I'll finetune here that 1993-4 was effectively the Hillary / Carter administration, with an assist from about the second or third worst Congress in my memory, and that voters remembered, which is how Hillary failed 2016. For Hillary-Carter's defence I'll do my In Fairness thing and say that the ISS was demonstrable science, and that we arguably needed a precursor to doing the more-advanced science - like for reusing space junk. What was the alternative to the ISS: having nothing up there, over the past decades?

This reuse plan has issues. Some of the issues are legal. On that topic, I'd propose: if you leave space-junk behind, it remains yours ... for a year. You have that year to grab back your junk for whatever peaceful purpose. After that year, it goes to that Life In Hell law of the briny deep: finders-keepers. And there's no grandfather-clause; all that sh!t the Soviets and Nixon tossed up there over the '70s is up for grabs. I mean, the US should look to its own hardware first, before pirating some Hindustani orbital poo; but that's just out of poo-fessional courtesy, and if the Chinese or Brasilians grabble it first... meh.

I also must warn that rockets that get you to LEO are, also, in LEO. So getting them back might not make them junk anymore... they remain traffic, tho'. [UPDATE 11/23] First, I'd like most in the same orbit at around the same place. I have my eye on that LEO factory. We should have a whole scrapyard around the factory, corraling all this crap in one place for reuse and/or repair. And some habitat-ready spent tanks can be raised to higher orbits, for use there.