“We need to get revenue at an early stage, even before doing actual debris removal, to prove that we are commercial, as a business,” said Mr. Okada, who added that he had already raised $43 million from investors.

The more ambitious step will come in 2018, when Mr. Okada says Astroscale will launch a craft called the ELSA 1. Larger than its predecessor, the ELSA 1 will be loaded with sensors and maneuvering thrusters that will allow it to track and intercept a piece of debris.

The company settled on a lightweight and simple approach to grabbing space debris: glue. Astroscale has worked with a Japanese chemical company to create an adhesive that would cover a flat surface about the size of a dinner plate on the ELSA 1. The craft would bump into a piece of space junk, which would stick to the craft and be dragged out of orbit. Both the ELSA 1 and the debris would burn up on re-entry.

The concept of deorbiting space junk is not novel. As the debris problem has grown in urgency in recent years, space agencies and companies have released dozens of concepts for cleaning up low Earth orbit.

The Air Force has proposed a “laser broom” that would use ground-based lasers to vaporize a spot on an object’s surface, creating a puff that would act like an engine to push it down toward the atmosphere.

Other proposals call for using robotic arms, nets, tethers and even harpoons to spear debris. The challenge, experts say, is to build an unmanned spacecraft that can be used to track, approach and grab a dark object tumbling through space at 17,000 miles per hour.