The earth is already surrounded by a dangerous cloud of our crap.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

The orbital debris dots are scaled according to the image size of the graphic to optimize their visibility and are not scaled to Earth.

... and the rockets that put it there polluted the earths's atmosphere too.

Aside from a few select scientific projects, I'm not sure the exploitation of space is making our world a better place.

A common expression from the good old days before 'space exploration'. Meant all the tv funneled through New York City, and somewhere a 707 was carrying the news camera footage.. literal images on physical motion picture film .. to where it could be quickly developed and put on the late (11 PM) news. Hence the following:

President Kennedy shot.. film at 11.
Yankees win pennant. film at 11.
End of the World. Film at 11.

I'm not anxious to go back.

If we are talking about the intellectual decline of rural areas then satellite television is as ghastly as AM radio. The universal availability of crap television "news" was not a good thing.

I quit television news and opinion entirely more than twenty years ago. I don't watch it on the internet either. I don't look at any of those news and opinion videos posted here on DU. I quit "traditional" television (broadcast, cable, or satellite) more than a decade ago. I'm not exposed to any audio or video advertising in my daily life

It may not be a desirable thing to have cell phone and high speed internet service covering every square inch of the earth's surface, certain emergency and navigation services excluded.

My in-laws have a house in the California mountains. One of the pleasures of visiting the place, for me anyways, used to be the lack of cell phone service. Nobody could call me unless they knew where I was and had my in-laws land-line phone number. Now there is cell phone service.

As a troubled young man I spent a lot of time camping in the California desert. Nobody could reach me and nobody knew where I was. At the time I needed that, although I'm certain there were people including my parents, who might have preferred I was wearing a satellite tracking collar.

We should let the wild places be wild. If you need to be constantly connected, do it in the city or in some place served by rural electric service and fiber optic cable. The two can share the same right-of-ways.

Elon Musk's starlink, spacex, etc., are not making the world a better place. Neither are all those wealthy people pretending to live sustainably "off the grid" in the wilderness when they have all the comforts of urban living with ten times the environmental footprint.

... in the wrong time. The advent of reusable rockets has dropped the price of launch by a huge amount. Were it not for national pride and national security, SpaceX would handle all launch traffic for the whole earth. Yes, Elon Musk is a knuckle dragging Fascist. So was Hitler, the last guy to finance the last big leap forward in rocket technology. But the existence proof is out there, and everybody is out to invent reusable, cheap rockets. Its going to explode from here, and there would seem nothing you can do about it.

I wonder at the worry about putting junk in the skies. I'm an astronomer by profession, Phd 1974. And I don't like huge constellations of comm sats. But on the other hand, I do like multi-ton large telescopes in L2 halo orbit. And low earth orbit. If you want to worry about junk, do your local neighborhood. You could do something about that. Do the earth's oceans. We could do something about that. Junk in space??? To do something about that would require the large reusable rockets... that I think don't actually inspire you.

And by he way.. who appointed you Dictator Of Internet Access? Who should have high speed, and who is not deserving of this? And why does other people having internet access (I assume you yourself have access) somehow mean your quality of life is less? Your in-laws have cell service? Did you talk them out of it? Rip down their land line? Wasn't kerosene lamps good enough for them?

.. when any satellite over five years old is like a five year old computer. The newer version does much more at lower price.