He envisions a time when EDDEs could operate under the United Nations, which could tax anyone or any country that launches objects into LEO in order to cover the clean-up of trash there.

Star Inc. has already been doing some testing and expects to do a test flight in 2013. If all goes according to plan, a full phase removal of trash could begin by 2017, he said.

About 30 people are attending the Space Elevator conference on Friday, including Yuri Artsutanov, a Russian engineer born in 1929 who published a paper first describing a space elevator in 1960 that went unnoticed outside of Russia.

A space elevator would be a long rope made of nanomaterials, stretching from Earth to a counterweight at geosynchronous altitude, about 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometers) above Earth's surface. Shuttles, like elevator cars, would travel up and down the cable, ferrying people and objects into space.

Two years ago, a speaker at the conference caused a stir when he pointed to the major problem of space garbage, noting that at some point every piece of debris and every satellite would crash into the elevator. "Every one, with no exception," said Ivan Bekey, a former NASA scientist currently with Bekey Designs, at the time.