So awhile back, I watched an anime series recommended to me by Tak Wai: Planetes. I definitely recommend this series if you haven’t seen it before. It ranks among my favorites and I’d probably give it 9 out of 10 stars.
The series is standard length, 26 episodes long. In short, the background story is about how humans were reckless in the future and started dumping trash into space. Later down the road, they realized that all this space debris would ultimately come back to haunt them as even tiny debris coming at you at 50 miles per hour can cause major damage to your spacecraft. Therefore, a new division in the space agency was created and their purpose is to remove debris from space. Like the janitorial position, no one sees this new department as anything that great, but because of them, space exploration can continue with a lot fewer accidents.
The story begins with Tanabe joining the space agency and getting assigned to the space cleaning department. Hachimaki is assigned as her mentor, guiding her along and the episodes are a series of missions they go out on. Hachimaki’s dream has always been to one day end up owning his own spaceship. As the mission continues, Tanabe slowly reveals Hachimaki’s past, and that’s when things start to get interesting.
The description above doesn’t really do it justice and I can’t really say much more without spoiling something.
For more details, visit Wikipedia or AniDB.net. You can also check out the trailer on YouTube.