Escaping earth's orbit is expensive. Much cheaper in mass/payload/$$$ to simply deorbit and burn up for a lot of low earth orbit satellites. Or even "free" -

Escaping earth's orbit is expensive. Much cheaper in mass/payload/$$$ to simply deorbit and burn up for a lot of low earth orbit satellites. Or even "free" - a lot of these satellite megaconstellations will be brought down by atmospheric drag within a year of running out of fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit#Disposal_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_orbit#Disposal_orbit This also provides some passive decluttering of low earth orbit in case of hardware failures and the like. Such self destruct programs (or manual commands from a ground station) are common for farther out orbits like geostationary, although they typically just enter a slightly different orbit where they're out of the way and not taking up valuable real estate in particularly useful orbits, instead of escaping earth's gravity or deorbiting completely.