The mission aims to demonstrate technologies for rendezvous, capture, and deorbit for end-of-life satellites and to build a path to space junk remediation.
[7] The VESPA adapter that ClearSpace-1 originally aimed to capture is the size of a washing machine and weighs about 112 kilograms.
[8] ClearSpace-1's device has been described as a four-armed "space claw" that would grip VESPA and steer it back into the Earth's atmosphere, where both would be destroyed via destructive reentry.
[10] Due to the possibility of a collision with debris, the agency opted to change ClearSpace-1's target to the PROBA-1 satellite.
[11][12][13] In 2022, the UK Space Agency awarded £4 million to ClearSpace-1 and Astroscale to remove non-operational British satellites by 2026.