Japan’s minister for internal affairs and communications, Masatoshi Ishida (right), visits Astroscale’s exhibit at the G20 Osaka Summit in June.

Within a year, Astroscale plans to begin a complex series of demonstrations to show the startup’s spacecraft can grab a piece of space debris and dispose of it in the atmosphere.

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Debra Werner is a correspondent for SpaceNews based in San Francisco. Debra earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. She is a recipient...