Dale

Nope, not viable at all. A lot of it is straight up atomized on reentry especially for the smaller devices. Some of it is rare and some is not. The wet dream of these billionaires is they will be the first to figure out space mining and then manufacture. That’s why Elon musk has spacex and the boring company. Then raw resources like precious metals become infinite over night. Hopefully capitalism dies before that happens so we can all enjoy that.

And the orbits of that debris would still decay within a decade in LEO.

There’s reasonable hope at least that this is a problem that will solve itself, and unfortunately we have bigger problems to worry about.

That’s fair but unfortunately nothing compared to the pollution from launching them

Lmao I wish. Satellites and their components have to be “hardened” to survive extreme temperatures and radiation in space. There’s probably nothing on it you could disable with any laser you could buy. Plus there’s the matter of targeting them.

No way that’s cheaper or easier than waiting

Especially with the number of them it’s probably cheaper to just put up new satellites. LEO sats are designed to be temporary.

LEO satellites decay very quickly every one of them will burn up in the atmosphere within 10 years. They need to be replaced constantly. As soon as spacex goes out of business these will all fall out of the sky.