Space junk is getting worse. Could the answer be smart plastic wrap?

That concept, being investigated by Aerospace Corp. of Calif., involves blasting thousands of tiny, flat spacecraft into orbit. There they would find and hug the bits and pieces of failed satellites and rockets, dragging them into the atmosphere to burn up.

There are more than 7,000 metric tons of material in the near-Earth space environment, said J.C. Liou, NASA chief scientist for orbital debris. It can slam into an operating satellite or spacecraft at 6 miles per second — faster than a speeding bullet — which means that even debris the size of a grain of sand could be catastrophic.

That was shown in 2009, when an operational Iridium satellite collided with an inactive Russian satellite, creating more than 2,000 large pieces of orbital debris and many smaller pieces.

The problem is growing as more nations and companies get into the launch business. And it has spurred a number of creative solutions, including a giant net that would scoop up space junk and setting off a bomb to knock it out of orbit.

Most haven’t gotten past the development stage for a simple reason: No one wants to pay for them.

A Rand study on orbital debris published in 2010 found that although the space community agreed that space junk posed a risk, the lack of government and private industry funding to remove it suggested the “perception of risk” had not yet crossed a “critical threshold that would prompt demands for remediation.”

In other words, it’s going to take some expensive space disasters to make it worth investing in a fix.

Although NASA has funded some smaller technology development projects, it has yet to support demonstrations or operational missions, said Bill Ostrove, aerospace and defense analyst at Forecast International.

“It doesn’t really neatly fall under one particular organization’s jurisdiction,” he said. “It’s almost like a hot potato problem.”

Aerospace Corp.’s plastic-wrap idea, called the Brane Craft, is being funded with an early stage grant from NASA. Though only in early theoretical stages, it could be a “reasonably inexpensive way” of taking out the trash, said Siegfried Janson, a senior scientist in Aerospace’s microsatellite systems department.