In addition to posing insurmountable military opportunity costs and the potential of another costly arms race, space weapons directly threaten the fiscal health of the space sector itself. Use of destructive weapons in space would obviously promote an orbital debris problem that is on the threshold of becoming a major inhibitor to space commerce. Currently, the US Space Surveillance Network uses ground-based radar and optical/infrared sensors to track roughly 7,500 objects across orbital space. That constitutes objects greater than 10 cm in diameter in low Earth orbit to objects greater than 1 m diameter in geostationary orbit. Only approximately five per cent of those objects are operating satellites; the rest are effectively debris, 40 per cent of which are fragments of disintegrated satellites and upper stages of rockets.

---

Deblois, Bruce M. "The Advent of Space Weapons." Astropolitics. Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 2003). [ 15 quotes ]