Neuraspace’s Chiara Manfletti urges lunar “scrapyards” to stop Earth-orbit debris spiraling

On August 5, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage is expected to crash into the Moon, a reminder that humans are already changing the Solar System, not just studying it. The bigger issue is what we do with the hardware we cannot easily clean up, because Earth orbit is already crowded and the traffic is only set to increase. Chiara Manfletti, CEO of satellite collision avoidance business Neuraspace, is blunt about why Earth-orbit behavior is a weak model: “some orbits are protected and some are not,” and she says that “was never a good approach” given how many objects are going up.

Manfletti’s alternative is to treat the Moon like a future industrial yard rather than a passive backdrop. She suggests selecting specific locations on the Moon’s surface as dumping grounds, where material could be deposited, collected, and recycled. Her reasoning is sustainability-driven: she thinks this would be “more sustainable than, for example, re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere,” because the material “are resources that we could reuse.” The subtext for executives is that disposal is not a single decision anymore. It becomes a design choice that determines whether the next decade is about perpetual cleanup or purposeful reuse.

To understand why this is hard, you have to look at what Earth-orbit has tried so far. There are graveyard orbits, where spacecraft can be placed instead of controlled re-entry, and Manfletti acknowledges the existence of that alternative while also calling it “not particularly sustainable.” Her suggestion to someday reuse material there points to the core tension: moving debris somewhere else can buy time, but it does not automatically create a circular outcome. In other words, the industry has options, but not many closed-loop ones.

The practical blocker is coordination. Manfletti argues there is no single body that can make everyone behave. “We don’t have a single body,” she says, and she highlights how governments and industry tend to react once authority appears. The pattern, as she describes it, is: one actor speaks, everyone else thinks, “fantastic, they have spoken, and we shall do it.” She says that is not how it works, and the consequence is predictable. Any system that depends on every nation and company following the same rules is likely to get stuck in the slow lane.

She was also not particularly keen on regulations when she spoke in 2024, partly because getting every nation and company to follow identical rules would be nearly impossible. The Moon does not automatically solve that problem, but it could change the incentive structure. Manfletti points to what she calls “soft ways” to steer behavior, involving strong stakeholders who may not have legal power to impose requirements. The goal would be to shift demand: “all of a sudden, there’s more of a demand for sustainable activities in orbit.” That framing matters because it suggests a market-first path, not just a rule-first one. If buyers, operators, or mission planners reward sustainability, then compliance becomes a competitive advantage rather than a paperwork chore.

The stakeholders she lists are also a clue to how coordination might evolve. She names the US, China, and notes that India is starting to have a strong Moon program, along with Europe. Her concern is that it is “questionable” whether China would put those requirements in, but she imagines that Europe, the US, and India could raise the bar. That is the strategic chessboard: if enough major players treat sustainable handling as a baseline for missions, the rest of the market may follow even without a single global enforcement agency.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Neuraspace already uses AI and ML models to predict and compute probabilities of collisions between satellites and other objects in Earth orbit, which directly ties to why collision avoidance has become a board-level issue, not just a technical one. The source notes the number of objects has increased rapidly since she spoke in 2024, and it was not the growth itself that surprised her. It was the sudden public awareness of space infrastructure. Manfletti points to the interfacing between space activities and the Ukraine war, including “spoofing and jamming of Galileo” while von der Leyen was traveling. Her point is not policy theater. It is that geopolitical conflict made space infrastructure something everyone talked about, fast.

That awareness matters because it can accelerate funding, scrutiny, and policy attention. If decision-makers suddenly see orbital assets as critical infrastructure, then the cost of unmanaged debris becomes more visible too. And if lunar traffic increases, as the source says it is set to, the industry gets a rare chance to avoid repeating Earth’s mistakes. The question for executives is straightforward: will you plan for disposal, or plan for reuse? Manfletti’s “lunar scrapyards” idea is essentially a bet that the next hub of activity can be built with a more circular mindset than the last one.