Yep, this was a longstanding concern early in '2000 when I worked in Satcoms. I had the pleasure interacting a little with Dr TS Kelso, to reuse his freely available, original SGP4 tracking engine (he is another well known figure in the field of satellite tracking), whilst developing some tracking software for my own purposes, there were less than 4000 trackable objects at that time, in all orbits, not just LEO. So I thought a practical upper limit for the capability of my software would be 10,000 objects.
Little did we know what was to come in the future.
Btw, I wouldn’t assign too much credit to Space X for development of rocket Engines, they are reusing some very old technology, originally created by government money.
Space X might be flying high for now, but I wonder how it will fare when profits are hit by what has to be now the inevitable onset of a full-on, more or less permanent Kessler state in LEO.
And what was it all for, when collaborative 5G led by Chinese technology, working with us up until just a few months earlier, developed over 20 years, is so much better, but nope, Space X had to try to compete with that, with a half-cocked scheme to throw up thousands of almost diy quality satellites in a few months flat, great publicity, for now, but at what cost? We’ll soon see.
In satellites, and in business, what goes around, comes around.