Alright, rocket jockeys. Get in here. I don’t know what kind of half-cocked space-frat party you satellite barons have been throwing these last 20 years, but low Earth orbit is becoming so thoroughly and hazardously enshittified by private companies and their broken satellites that something has to be done before you send us into a global telecom blackout and turn the skies into a space-gore B-movie full of dead astronauts.
The Federal Communications Commission has started writing tickets for wrist-slap fines for space trash, beginning with the $150,000 it’s charging Dish Network after the company failed to cleanup its dead EchoStar-7 satellite. Not that $150,000 is going to matter much to a company reporting $16.7 billion in revenue in 2022, but the fact that the FCC has to do something at all should be a wakeup call that the enshittification of space has indeed commenced.
