Re: What could possibly...
"OK how is this going to impact space aviation in the future?"
Believe it or not, "not that much". These things are all going into the same orbital belts (so instead of 1 or 2 sats in one orbit you might have 100 looping around) and "space is big, very big" in terms of being 3 dimensional.
There's a lot of effort going into ensuring these things don't shed parts and are de-orbital at end of life - and besides stuff at lower altitudes has a very short halflife anyway (months to years). It's things in the 600-6000km range that's annoying and worrying as it can stay up there for centuries.
The vast majority of junk up there is from missions predating the 1980s. Attitudes changed when things like 2nd stage boosters left shut down in orbit (without venting everything) started exploding and the Skylab guys spent an anxious few months worrying about where their launch vehicle would come down, not having planned a return trajectory and then realising that it was large enough to cause mayhem if it landed on a populated area.
These days just about _everything_ which doesn't need to be in orbit (eg, second stages, etc) is left in deeply eccentric orbits where the lowest point is low enough into the atmosphere that it'll come down in a few orbits thanks to friction.
There's still a shitload of stuff to bring down, particularly from higher orbits, but a laser broom is probably the most viable option. One of the biggest impediments to getting it underway isn't cost, but the politics of actually getting all the countries with stuff in LEO to agree to allow it, as starting to bring down debris could be interpreted as a hostile act. Remember how the USSR were shitting bricks about Shuttle's return from orbit capabilities?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
