Last year, Russia decided that the best way to get rid of an aging spy satellite was to shoot it down with a missile.

Given the distinct lack of, well, anything in space, the debris from that satellite began orbiting Earth and crew aboard the International Space Station were forced to take cover until given the all clear by ground teams.

We mention this incident because while Russia’s decision to shoot a satellite down created even more space junk, there was already a lot of it to begin with.

According to Privateer, there are 27 000 human-made objects in orbit being tracked but the limitation is that we are only able to track objects 9.7cm in diameter.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, what is Privateer?

Back in October 2021 reports began surfacing that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was forming a company with Alex Fielding (another former Apple bigwig) and astrodynamicist Dr Moriba Jah. That company is known as Privateer and it has now officially broken cover with Wozniak as president, Fielding as CEO and chairman and Jah as chief scientist.

The company isn’t like SpaceX or Blue Origin. The goal of the company is quite plainly to create data infrastructure that allows for the collection and processing of information about space objects. To put it in simple terms, Privateer wants to be able to map where every single space object in orbit that humanity has created.

For starters the company has released Wayfinder, an open-access real-time visualisation of satellites and debris orbiting the Earth.

You can find Wayfinder here and we have to say, what Privateer has built here is impressive. There are of course many ways to track objects in our orbit and Wayfinder appears to be one of the more user friendly solutions. We were able to track a satellite’s path for a few hours using the options available to us and it is genuinely fascinating to gawk at.

“There’s a real need for us here on Earth who don’t work in the space industry to begin to understand how space debris impacts us every day,” Wozniak told CNN.

“Many of us don’t realize how much of our lives are reliant on services delivered from and through space — GPS services, financial transactions, climate monitoring. Our life on Earth is connected to space and even the smallest debris orbiting the Earth can damage and destroy these critical capabilities for some of the most basic aspects of our day-to-day life,” the president of Privateer added.

Perhaps most important is Privateer’s goal of selling its services to satellite owners. The data the firm aims to provide could prevent collisions in future and considering satellite internet has reached a new level of interest, this could prove to be an incredibly valuable solution.

While Privateer hasn’t made mention of cleaning up space the work it’s doing is perhaps more important than the actually cleaning. We say that because in order to clean up our orbit, we need to know where everything is. It helps nobody if a satellite loaded with glue to catch debris, gets hit by debris en route.

You can read more about Privateer and its ambitions here.