Space Junk: The Next Crisis Liberals Are Ignoring
America’s skies aren’t just getting crowded by illegal migrants and Chinese spy balloons—they’re getting choked with space junk, and once again, the globalist bureaucrats are asleep at the switch. Forget Hollywood’s rosy images of satellites gracefully circling the Earth. The truth? Low Earth orbit is becoming a garbage dump at 17,000 miles per hour, thanks to years of unaccountable international meddling, toothless treaties, and the “progressive” obsession with endless government and corporate expansion.
It’s a free-for-all up there, as countries and companies launch thousands of satellites—sometimes just to show off, sometimes to make a quick buck. In 2000, there were just 700 satellites in low orbit. Now? Over 15,000. SpaceX alone has sent up more than 10,000, with China racing behind, and the rest of the world scrambling to keep up. What’s left over when satellites die, explode, or collide isn’t just some harmless space dust—it’s over a million chunks of man-made shrapnel, each one a missile waiting to punch through a multi-million-dollar project (or, let’s not kid ourselves, a future missile platform). These pieces don’t gently float around. They rocket through space faster than any fighter jet, enough to rip right through whatever stands in their way.
Meanwhile, so-called “active debris removal” efforts are a joke. A couple of boutique tech companies put on a show for the U.K. Space Agency, grabbing a dead satellite here and there, while China, Russia, and others treat Earth’s orbit like the Wild West. Let’s not forget: communist China already proved it can smash its own satellites to pieces just to test weapons, showering the orbit with thousands of deadly fragments. Russia’s at it too—smashing up old hardware with reckless abandon, and putting peaceful space exploration, even the safety of astronauts, at risk. But what does the United Nations do? Nothing. Their treaties mean less than the price of their lunch in Manhattan.
The real laugher is that the progressive regime wants us to surrender American leadership in space to a patchwork of “global” agreements. They didn’t work for the oceans, they don’t work for the Arctic, and they sure aren’t working up in orbit. While liberal elites wring their hands about “space equity” and carbon footprints, basic safety and security are ignored. Space warfare is openly discussed, but the “rules-based international order” looks the other way as rivals prep for the day when the world’s communications, commerce, navigation, and defense might be scattered in a hailstorm of flying trash. Who pays the price? Not the paper-pushers in Brussels or New York.
America led the way to the stars. But now, by tolerating bureaucratic incompetence and caving to globalist pressure, we’ve enabled a lawless space dump inches from disaster. We all know what happens when government “coordination” replaces common sense—nobody is held accountable, everyone passes the buck, and the taxpayer gets left holding the bag. Why should anyone trust the same people who can’t secure a border or balance a budget to keep orbit clean—and America safe?
Here’s the burning question: will leaders finally wake up and put America’s interests first in space, or will they wait for the day when the skies are so clogged with junk that no one—not even Elon Musk—can get a rocket off the ground? Time to quit playing nice with lawless nations and useless treaties. The future of American security and prosperity is up there. Let’s keep it ours.
Source: American Thinker
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