I've been reading about space junk for a while, if we are in fact 'past the tipping point' (as opposed to journalistic hyperbole) then you should be planning how your App will work in a post-GPS world. Seriously. While certain bands of orbit are currently more crowded than others, as the Chinese satellite attack [1] demonstrated, the debris from collisions will be wide and multiband. Further once it reaches that point the density is predicted to prevent additional satellites from reaching useful orbit trying to get through it (so more replacement Geo-sync satellites). Perhaps it will be the 21st century's equivalent of land mines in terms of resource denial to unintended victims.
Would make a great conference topic too, given SpaceX has a launch vehicle that can get your idea to pretty much all of the orbital bands for $150M, what might you do with a couple of tons of payload which would mitigate this problem, and how can we compensate it? What if the US/China/USSRS/EU funded a 'bounty' that for every ton of junk de-orbited the person who de-orbited it would get $1M.
At a NASA talk on space debris (part of the Space Technology Grand Challenge program at NASA [1]) the presenter mentioned that so called 'structured orbit' systems (like Iridium and GPS) were particularly vulnerable because their service depended on where they were in orbit and they had finite maneuvering capability. So GPS destruction is a combination of satellites which run out of gas swerving and jinking to avoid junk, and losing individual satellites due to forced (de-orbit) or worse actual destruction.
It was by that reasoning that this presenter was describing the space junk disaster as a sort of slow motion thing but the first indicator that you and I would notice would be that GPS service goes away. Its also exponential in that actual collisions threaten on 1 or 2 additional satellites but dozens in orbits above and below.
Then he finished with current NASA timelines (about 25 years before a system might be tested) and funding (0).
Granted he may have just been trying to rustle up funding for his pet project but I found his reasoning pretty compelling.
Would make a great conference topic too, given SpaceX has a launch vehicle that can get your idea to pretty much all of the orbital bands for $150M, what might you do with a couple of tons of payload which would mitigate this problem, and how can we compensate it? What if the US/China/USSRS/EU funded a 'bounty' that for every ton of junk de-orbited the person who de-orbited it would get $1M.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mis...