So much space junk up there...eventually it will be impossible to leave earth without risking a hit from a screw travelling 50k miles per hour

Lol, wait until Elon and everyone else sets off the Kessler Syndrome. There won’t be shit up in the sky after that.

Looks my photo of Orion nebula! No but seriously, like 80% of the frames I took had satellite streaks. It's becoming a rather difficult target to photograph, at least relative to my place on Earth. Sucks to see this likely to become true for Hubble too.

And it's only going to get worser.

Is there any feesible plan for removing all the space junk? Has any authority that's reliable put forth a plan that could actually work?

For future missions they could probably detect a sat pass by an obvious bright dot moving in a straight line and then prevent that small area from being added to output photo. It would still be an issue for Hubble and a range of other older telescopes but some newer ones could receive a software update given the HW could handle the change.

Honestly, Hubble is old, very old. It was based on a spy satellite that the US developed in the 70s, we built 5 of them. There were essentially 5 hubbles looking down at the earth and only 1 looking up.

But those spy satellites were retired years ago, they're 4 generations old now. Since then, we've gradually launched 14 other spy sats to replace them.

All that is to say, why are we still content with our 1 ancient Hubble telescope? Clearly there is a budget for more. If the military can point 19 satellites down at the earth, surely we should be able to point 5 upward, right?

Yeah, the Hubble is struggling up there in LEO, but this isn't a hubble problem, it's a US prioritization problem. You get what you pay for, and apparently we're only willing to pay for war.

There's so much crap up there. Are there any regulations or can billionaires start fucking up space now too?

How about:

• Stick them somewhere out of the way, like the dark side of the Moon.

• Use multiple space telescopes and build a composite image.