Could we turn space junk into a moonbase?

Thanks to David Whitehouse for the answer!

David - There have been various initiatives over the years to prevent people from causing more junk. But in the last six months or so, it's now written in law in the United States that you have to have a means for removing your satellite when it's at the end of its life from a useful orbit and put it somewhere where it won't be a problem, preferably burn it up in the Earth's atmosphere. This used to be a convention that you did this, now it's coming into law and the first fine by the American government took place just a couple of months ago. So there are things moving in that direction, and there's a growing international cooperation that this is something that in the past was left voluntarily and has to be done legally now.

Will - So is there anything we can do about the space junk that's already up there?

David - If a satellite fails catastrophically, then there's nothing you can do. It's just stuck in that orbit. There are a couple of companies in the world who are working on smaller satellites, which will go up to an errant satellite, grab it, and then possibly bring it back down to earth so it burns up or push it into an orbit where it's not a problem. But you're never going to be able to do that for many satellites. Most of it we're going to have to tackle with just not causing any more and waiting for the stuff up there to decay naturally, which is going to take decades. There is no way of gathering, in any significant bulk or numbers, the junk that is up there and using it for something else. Space is just too big, junk is too numerous, and you'd use up so much fuel to go from one part to another to collect this stuff and collect small stuff along the way. Nobody's going to do that. It's just too expensive and too difficult.