Orbital debris

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The population of non-functional objects in Earth orbit: spent upper stages, dead satellites, deliberately destroyed spacecraft, released hardware, and fragments from collisions, explosions and surface degradation. Space surveillance networks catalogue tens of thousands of objects large enough to track — broadly, above about ten centimetres in low Earth orbit — while statistical models put the number above one centimetre in the high hundreds of thousands to over a million, and the number above one millimetre in the hundreds of millions. The size distribution is what makes it dangerous: at closing speeds around ten kilometres per second an untrackable centimetre-scale fragment carries the kinetic energy of a small car at motorway speed, so the objects most likely to destroy a satellite are precisely the ones that cannot be avoided because they cannot be seen. Two deliberate anti-satellite tests and one accidental collision account for a large share of the catalogued fragments in low Earth orbit. The economic character of the problem is that it is a classic externality: the cost of a fragment falls on every future operator of that altitude band, not on whoever created it. Not a terrestrial place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.