Turns out, that's pretty close to reality. It's the concept behind the Electrodynamic Debris Eliminator, or EDDE, a space vehicle being developed by Star Inc. with funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.

Jerome Pearson, president of Star Inc., presented the idea for what he calls "a space garbage truck" on Friday at the annual Space Elevator conference in Redmond, Washington. Pearson was an early proponent of the idea of building a space elevator, and a paper he wrote about it in 1975 inspired the description of a space elevator in Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction book, The Fountains of Paradise, which popularized the idea.

Space garbage happens to be one of the biggest obstacles to building a space elevator.

Pearson's proposed EDDE vehicle will come equipped with around 200 nets, like butterfly nets, that it extends to scoop up garbage in low-earth orbit. Over a period of seven years, 12 EDDE vehicles could capture all 2,465 identified objects over 2 kilograms floating in LEO, Pearson says.

Once it captures the object, the EDDE can do several things with it. EDDE can fling the garbage such that it lands in the South Pacific, where it has little chance of dangerously landing on anything important.