It's more regulation than research. The idea of a Kessler cascade (where debris collides with a satellite, causing more debris, causing more collisions) is well

It's more regulation than research. The idea of a Kessler cascade (where debris collides with a satellite, causing more debris, causing more collisions) is well known, and there is a lot of work to avoid it. This means everything from eliminating things that might be jettisoned from rockets (like the despin weights on the upper stage of the Delta II), to deorbiting rocket boosters, to designing stages and satellites to fail safely without causing debris. One of the more interesting things is the design for SpaceX's new Starlink satellites, which will be in a low enough orbit that they will deorbit within a few years if one fails. (If not, they can boost themselves into higher orbits.) The other thing that helps is that there are only 43,864 objects large enough to track ever launched, and Only about 18,000 of them are still up there. While that seems like alot, that's the number of people at a baseball game, spread out over an area larger than the surface of the earth. (And even larger in volume.) https://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/master.php https://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/master.php