mylsolved and the Space Graveyard

You ever feel like the future was supposed to be cleaner? Not just, like, morally cleaner, but physically? I was reading about space debris the other day—dead satellites, lost tools, flecks of paint traveling at 17,000 miles an hour—and I realized that mylsolved is not a thing. There is no app, no algorithm, no clever piece of engineering that has magically swept the sky clear of our mess. We just kept throwing metal up there and hoping gravity would be someone else's problem.

The aerospace industry loves a good solve. We love the idea that if we just throw enough bright minds at a problem, we can engineer our way out of anything. We built rockets that could think, satellites that could talk to each other, and materials that could survive the vacuum of space. But for all that intelligence, we forgot to build a broom. We created a mylsolved narrative where innovation equals progress, but progress without maintenance is just... deferred chaos.

I think about the astronauts up there, looking out their little windows. They're representing the peak of human achievement, floating in a tin can held together by sheer will and math. And outside, whizzing past them at speeds that could turn a bolt into a bomb, is the garbage of every mission that came before. It’s like living in a beautiful penthouse apartment located directly above a landfill. You can pretend it's not there, but the smell—or in this case, the risk—eventually seeps in.

The term "space graveyard" exists. It’s a real place. It’s a zone in the South Pacific where spacecraft go to die. We literally have a cemetery for our ambitions. And we keep adding to it. We keep building, keep launching, because the economic imperative—the need for global internet, for better imaging, for that competitive edge—overrides the visual of a planet wrapped in a metallic shroud of our own hubris.

Everyone is looking for that mylsolved moment. The magic bullet that will let us have our megaconstellations and an unpolluted sky, too. Lasers to de-orbit junk, nets to catch dead sats, giant claws in space. It sounds like a superhero movie. But the reality is, we’re just good at breaking things and really, really bad at cleaning them up. We do it with the ocean, we do it with the air, and now we’re doing it with the infinite void.

I’m not saying we should stop reaching. The drive to go up, to go out, is probably the best part of us. It’s curiosity made manifest. But the best parts of us are often accompanied by the worst: our carelessness. We treat the cosmos like a rental car. We drive it fast, we don’t check the oil, and we leave the trash in the back seat hoping the next guy deals with it.

So when I hear someone pitch the next big thing in aerospace as the ultimate mylsolved for global communication or space exploration, I get skeptical. Because the real problem isn't the tech. The real problem is us. We haven't solved the basic equation of how to do incredible things without leaving a trail of wreckage behind. Until we figure that out, the final frontier is just going to look a lot like the first one: beautiful, wild, and increasingly full of our empty bottles.