Significantly increasing perigee is pretty unlikely, though, and it is in the perigee where most of the braking action takes place. Highly elliptic orbits with

Significantly increasing perigee is pretty unlikely, though, and it is in the perigee where most of the braking action takes place. Highly elliptic orbits with low perigee are very unstable. "And even a few years is quite enough to destroy everything in the low orbit." That is precisely the assertion that I would at least like to see convincingly modeled. Because "enough to destroy everything" is a very big claim.