Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios Companies and governments around the world are racing to figure out how to clean up human-made junk that is cluttering space. Why it matters: Trackers are seeing more and more close calls between satellites, as companies work to deploy constellations of hundreds to thousands of small spacecraft, adding to fears that those small satellites could become junk themselves. Cleaning up junk requires finding new ways to remove it from orbit — and experts say regulations and policy need to be clarified to prevent more from accumulating. At the moment, NASA estimates there are hundreds of thousands of untrackable pieces of junk in orbit around the Earth that threaten operational satellites and even people in space.