DirecTV races to decommission broken satellite before it explodes

I know, I know, the above is close to hopelessly optimistic. It's like when I was younger: I remember thinking, "I'm not going to smoke cigarettes, but if I did it would probably be okay. By the time it would really matter, medicine will have surely found cures." I was an idiot, though I never did smoke.

Public resources are always consumed while public exists. We should thrive to always experiment, learn from it and evolve/do better.

When we're talking about satellites in graveyard orbits, no humans can see it, there's no wildlife, or really any environment to damage. None of the concerns we have with litter apply. Trying to speak against it as if it's litter is then either an attempt to shoehorn a concept into a place where it doesn't apply to make a snap judgement, or a malicious attempt to attach something for other reasons. No comment on which is going on here, but if you're going to convince anybody not to enjoy the many benefits of geostationary satellites, you're going to need to make a better case than likening it to "litter".

Low Earth orbits do have atmospheric drag issues, and those items need to have fuel to replace lost velocity and restore the correct orbit.

The ISS page has a neat table of orbital height over time where you can see the burns to 'jack it back up'.

Satellites in lower positions actually have to maintain their orbit due to orbital decay. Because Geostationary orbit is so far away, there's a lot less decay.

For example SpaceX's starlink only has a lifespan of 5 years, and this is because of their low orbit.

For physical intuition, uh, the atmosphere is a hundred times further away than the graveyard orbit.

De-orbiting to hit the atmosphere at a shallow angle would actually take slightly less delta-v than de-orbiting to a straight plunge to Earth. But both are much larger than the delta-v required to get to a graveyard orbit.

So we're in a stable orbit with a high periapsis (closest part of our orbit to earth). To de-orbit we need to lower the periapsis so that it touches the atmosphere, and on each pass the satellite will slow down, further lowering the apoapsis and periapsis. The problem is that to do this we have to burn all that horizontal velocity that's keeping us in orbit in the first place, which is a crapload.

An alternative is to instead change the orbit so it's no longer in geostationary orbit and potentially interfering with live satellites, so instead they just push the satellite further out into the "graveyard orbit".

There's 100x difference in the needed energy for the two methods, and I'm sure you can see why most would opt for the graveyard orbit.

EDIT: To add, it's actually rather difficult to "plunge into earth". To do this you need to burn all of your horizontal velocity (I think that's around 3.07 km/s in geostationary orbit?). Reaching the sun is actually really difficult as well for the same reason, you have to lose all of your horizontal velocity, and earth has a ton.

The issue with space debris is with orbits in the 500-5,000km range. Lower than that and the debris will reenter quickly, higher and you start getting spread out enough to not matter as much.

And you can only pickup garbage that's in a similar orbit too.

Low Earth Orbit is a bigger concern; but much of the concern in that region is spent rocket stages which have enough propellant inside them that they eventually explode and then for several months-years we have lots of debris (and then threat of a Kessler Cascade). The international community has responded to this threat by adding regulations on the proper disposal of spent rocket stages. (Occasionally, similar to this satellite, there are failed stages which do explode, but it should not happen often or on a normal path.)