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I wholly agree with the spirit of your post, but I thought LEO is not that problematic because there is still atmospheric drag there that will bring down rubbis

I wholly agree with the spirit of your post, but I thought LEO is not that problematic because there is still atmospheric drag there that will bring down rubbish in the matter of years.

SonicScrub 5y ago
Well the clean-up problem get's even more complicated with MEO and beyond as the amount of space becomes even larger. As for space-junk not being a problem in LEO, you are correct that space junk in LEO will de-orbit in a somewhat reasonable time-frame (on the order of a few years), but that's still problematic. It would still cause the destruction of 100s of billions of dollars worth of equipment, the ceasing of any operations dependent on LEO satellite equipment, and either increasing the risk or out-right blocking launches through LEO for a number of years. The fact that this would be temporary does not mean it isn't very bad.